Before And After The Epiphany

A while back I was asked to do the keynote address at a music educator's conference. Having never done and with no idea how to do a keynote, I immediately accepted and started writing. What I ended up with was an attempt to put my creative process into words, a reminiscence of my musical life up to that point, and a tribute and thank you to the great teachers I've had. 

Before and After the Epiphany


I’m very honoured and humbled to have been asked to share with you this afternoon. Y’know, as the singer in a rock band, speaking on stage for more than a couple minutes of between song banter usually means I blew something up… or the bassist had to pee real bad and I’m stalling… Suffice it to say,this kind of engagement is novel for me, so if I happen to freeze, yelling Free Bird or drum solo! should snap me out of it and back into my comfort zone.

I would like to speak today about my experience with musical epiphanies and how they’ve directed and shaped my life and career. I’m guessing that all the composers in the room have experienced these Eureka moments where in a lightning flash we catch a glimpse of something new. These sudden realizations, whose transformative sea changes carry us to an instant awareness of previously unimaginable things… They are how songs reveal themselves to us in the time it takes to flick on a light switch, like a surprise birthday party in our minds. They are the mystic medium through which new projects fall‐sometimes fully formed‐into our laps. Sometimes they manifest themselves as the climax and release after puzzling over an answer to something, and other times,to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan, they are “not a slow explosion outward from centre to margins but an instant implosion and an interfusion of space and functions”. They are the currency we deal in as creative people and they remain, thankfully, a mystery to me, although I’ve made my living with what happens in their wake.

I am in large part a product of music in schools, both formal and informal, although music dropped my jaw and widened my eyes long before I began studying in earnest. My earliest musical memory is of lying on my grandmother’s living room floor as a toddler, listening repeatedly to my mother’s 45 of R Dean Taylor’s Indiana Wants Me. It wasn’t so much the melody or rhythm that entranced me, but the siren sound in the song which I pretended was being made by the matchbox police car I was playing 1 Adam 12 with. Once I could stand, my focus shifted to the little organ which was next to the record player, particularly the one‐touch chord feature with accompaniment. As I sat there keying random chords to the boom‐chick‐chick rhythm, I had my first musical epiphany: This was a whole universe I could conjure and shape at will, like sonic lego! I was forever changed, and I was hooked.

Some parents at my elementary school in Saskatoon brought music informally into the curriculum by sharing their love of folk songs with us and theirs were the first guitars I saw up close and got to mess around with. I got my first guitar when I was 10. It was an acoustic loaned to me as part of the 10 week trial program of lessons my parents enrolled me in. It was rough going at first; translating the symbols on the page into the necessary contortions on the neck hurt my brain and made my frustrated fingers sore, particularly the introduction of barre chords, (which require one finger to fret multiple strings), in the shape of an F major. I nearly gave up a few weeks in but my parents encouraged me to at least finish the program before I made a decision. Then I got the flu and had to stay home for a few days. In my woozy, sleep deprived and drugged up state I approached the guitar from the other side of my brain. I lay it on the bed and hit the body, sang into the soundhole and heard the reverb it created, I blew on the strings, plucked the thumb‐piano‐like sound from the length of string between the nut and the tuning pegs… I reintroduced the concept of play into my playing. It was my second musical epiphany and it set me on a path I’m on to this day. As a result, I began to excel at the physical and theoretical elements of playing as well. The F major still hurt, but got easier every time.To prove it to you, here’s a song in F:

PLAY LONG DISTANCE LOVE

I rode that wave of F chord domination confidence to school and took up the trumpet in concert band and became the guitarist in the jazz combo. After a while, I made the transition from focusing on myself while playing to listening to the ensemble I was playing in. Through the initial squeaking of reeds and fart‐like misfires of horns I recognized the visceral power of playing with a band. I remember the queasy thrill of anticipation for performing live the very first time. At a school assembly I was to play trumpet in the concert band and then bust a guitar solo on, of all things, the theme song to the cringe‐inducing early 80s sit‐com ‘The Greatest American Hero”. The concert band performance went ok, and my heart was thumping as I strapped on my axe for my live guitar debut. My guitar by this time was a cheap, pointy, candy‐apple red shred machine that I’d worked many months on a paper route to buy. Pointy 80s guitars were equipped with Floyd Rose locking systems which were meant to keep them in tune throughout the dive‐bombs and Van Halen‐esque workouts that 80s shredders put them through. We started playing the song and it was going alright. I had visualized this moment over and over while practicing the solo my teacher and I had worked out. Then the big moment… A couple of notes into the solo, two of the locking nuts sproinged off the guitar, launching themselves into the audience, almost blinding someone before clattering away loudly on the gymnasium floor, throwing my guitar wayyyy out of tune. Mortified, I limped atonally through the rest of the solo, a lump in my throat and my tail between my legs, as people tried to stifle their laughter. You pointy red Judas, I thought to myself, barely resisting the urge to smash the thing theatrically to end the song and save face. Instead I hatched a plan for redemption. I re‐tuned the guitar as close to pitch as I could. As the final announcements were being made I went over to one of the two percussionists, Safwan Javed who had watched as the other drummer in the jazz band played a triumphant drum solo. “You and me, man. When everyone stands up to go back to class, hit it”. As the crowd stood to file out Safwan started thudding out the tom‐tom part to Wipe Out. I joined in, mostly in tune. We slayed. People cheered. Girls wanted to talk to me afterwards. I became ‘the guitar player’. It felt great. I learned a valuable lesson about performing and Safwan and I are bandmates to this day.

I started showing up to the well‐appointed band room before school and staying for hours after, often until the cleaners kicked me out. I’m grateful to the teachers I had who not only taught me the language and literature of music, but also encouraged me to experiment with all the available instruments, keyboards, things with strings, drums and horns… I’m grateful to the older, more accomplished students who let me jam with them on guitar, even though extended chords were still beyond my reach and I’d play a lot of power chords and Joe Satriani wannabe licks in their versions of standards like Stomp at the Savoy. My tentative baby steps on tunes like Giant Steps illuminated the concept of improvising with other people, which seemed like magic, like telepathy. I got my first taste of touring when our school band played in competitions and other schools. I’d found my calling. Now I wanted to put together a band of my own.

I met Earl Pereira when I was asked to play with a band from a rival high school at their variety night. I had been playing in a bunch of situations by this point, hungry for every musical experience I could have. He sang and played the bass well and eventually we formed a cover band and did some underage gigs. He encouraged me to sing which I’d never done before and I liked it, and I found that playing trumpet had kind of prepared me for it physically. Like in “Summer of ’69”, people filtered in and out of the band as other forces took priority over music in their lives. I started wondering what would happen if I got Earl and Safwan and I in the same room. We met in Saf’s parent’s basement; Earl in an Arby’s uniform, Safwan in his coveralls from working for the city and me in a tie from my job at a music store. We didn’t play anything we knew, we played songs that didn’t exist yet. We sweat through our uniforms, grinning and grimacing as we synergistically gave it all we had. None of us had ever experienced anything like it. We had found our band.

In the years that followed, we fought our way up through the trenches and have gone on to have hit singles and gold records, have toured the world with the Rolling Stones and AC/DC, in 2002 we became the first ever North American rock band to tour mainland China, we’ve been in a movie with Pacino, (one of the really bad ones), and we’ve been able to make a living playing music for all of our adult lives. Throughout our entire career, when we’re starting a new record, we go back to Safwan’s parents’ basement in Saskatoon for writing sessions to remind ourselves of what’s important. We wrote this one there:

PLAY SMILE

Now, some of these things I’ve just related maybe could be labeled ‘personal discoveries’, more than epiphanies, because while they were filled with wonder and forever changed my trajectory, they hardly sprang sui generis out of nothing and into my life. They were the result of things I can quantify and they evolved, like Mcluhan said, “from centre to margins” in a mostly logical fashion. It was when I became a songwriter that I experienced epiphanies more in keeping with the original meaning of the word, the “god showing himself to you” kind: Songwriters struggle to explain how they become possessed by their songs in one of two ways: “I’m a vessel, it just comes through me like it was dictated by a higher power”, or “I’m a craftsman, I build a song like a carpenter builds a house: methodically and through practice.” In my experience, both are true; often songs are fashioned from a bit of each. Sometimes I get a flashing glimpse of a song, or just part of it, like a hand reaching through the split in the curtain of my conscious mind, beckoning me. Focusing my attention on it sometimes yields results, like maybe the rest of an arm and a bit of a leg comes out, but no more. On these occasions I become the craftsman, drafting in my mind an arm to match the one I’ve been given, taking care to make it complementary and symmetrical, thinking of other arms and legs I’ve seen and admired, dressing it in the same clothes, imagining the body it would be attached to, and I paint these onto the curtain, lining them up with the arm and leg I’ve been given. The song comes to life, a kind of Roger Rabbit‐like mix of film and animation.

Other times, though, possibly when I’m otherwise occupied, occasionally when I’m performing, maybe while in bed on the edge of sleep, an entire song jumps out from behind the curtain into my astonished arms and yells, “I’m yours, sing me! Now!” I can’t explain these, and I know the songwriters among you share my stupefaction. There’s the famous story of McCartney dreaming Yesterday and playing it for everyone he could saying, “Did I write this? This has to exist already, right?”

I wrote a third of Wide Mouth Mason’s most successful record in under an hour, without a guitar, sitting alone next to a Dairy Queen in Prince George. I ‘heard’ the songs in their entirety, words and music, one after the other and had to sit down and transcribe them. They piled up in my head’s inbox like letters from a generous, anonymous muse.

I had a similar experience recently while floating in the ocean of pre‐sleep. Seven songs, some that I’d started and some that I was hearing for the first time, presented themselves to me. It was like lucid dreaming: I could choose to pause, fast forward, replay, zoom in… I didn’t even have to scramble to write them down, they are lodged in my head as I heard them that night as if I downloaded them to my brain’s itunes. Where do these come from? We can point to our brains’ limber limbic system, we can examine Arthur Koestler’s idea of bisociation, which illustrates how two seemingly unrelated ideas overlap like in a Venn diagram as the brain plays with the raw data we ingest, we can tap into Jung’s collective unconscious to try and find the answer… Possibly we’re just regurgitating intervals and phrases that have become meaningful to us, and like Einstein said, “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” Maybe the real question is, how and why do we drown out the impulse to create and play and be silly and spontaneous which fueled so many flights of imagination when we were kids? It’s my experience that that creative voice doesn’t go away, we just obscure it with ‘intelligence’ and grown‐up noise as we age. We become afraid to be wrong, to be silly. Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” As I said earlier, this process thankfully remains a mystery to me. I don’t need or even want a ‘how’ or a ‘why’. I feel blessed that it happens and that is enough.

Music has changed how I experience everything. Not just in the obvious ways, like showing me the value of dedication, giving me the confidence that comes with accomplishment, improving my motor skills or providing me with a creative outlet to express myself, although the effects of these on my life have been inestimable. It has opened the door to the rest of the world and its tapestry of culture, through exposure to different styles of music as well as by facilitating travel to other countries. Music has not only made it possible for me to travel the world, but it’s made me delve into my destinations’ culture on a deeper level. On tour in North America, I listen to music indigenous to the region we’re in and get to see the best artists on their home turf: I’ve heard sea shanties at kitchen parties in Newfoundland, jazz in the French quarter in New Orleans, blues in a southside club in Chicago… You feel the music in the way the people move and see it in the architecture and you can almost taste the environment in the music, like the peat in a glass of scotch. 

Wide Mouth Mason was very honoured to perform at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1997 and 1999, (which we just released as a cd/dvd called Live! Montreux, Switzerland). Following our triumphant first appearance there, on a high that I can still feel today, we made our way to one of the festival venues hoping to jam with some of our heroes as we’d been doing every night of our week‐long stay there. I was approached by the bassist from legendary Congolese singer Papa Wemba’s band. He said that everyone from the band had showed up to jam except their guitarist and asked if I’d like to play with them. I said that I’d be honoured to but that I had no idea how to play soukous music. Overhearing this, one of the backup singers/dancers glided over and said, “You’ll be alright honey, just watch me and play what I dance.” We took the stage: two percussionists, a keyboard player, the bassist who also sang lead, the three singer/dancers, and me.We played one song, full of call and response, dense polyrhythms and improvisational tangents, for about forty minutes. The lady singer directed me through all the changes by accenting beats with her body and smiling when I got the feel right. At one point all the musicians on stage turned to me and I closed my eyes and played, as best I could, all my gratitude and wonder for the last week’s experiences into a solo which I may have equaled since, but have never surpassed. I opened my eyes to a stage full of smiling and nodding musicians and huge response from the crowd. I feel very blessed to have been welcomed into their musical world.

While in Greece I focused on playing modally, inspired by the Ionian islands, and the sun bleached homes perched on cliffs like the raised 4th of the Lydian mode. In Spain, where it was almost impossible not to play Spanish guitar I’d attempt to approach the passion of the flamenco singers with their Arabic melisma, Afghanistan, where I used a slide to dip my toe into the microtonal music I heard during Ramadan celebrations… While on tour in China, I explored the pentatonic scale in its birthplace and heard it in the melodies of the millions of Mandarin words surrounding me. I had a surreal illustration of music’s universality while there. In 2002, Wide Mouth Mason became the first North American rock band to tour mainland China. We toured from Beijing to Wuhan over the course of a couple weeks, playing opulent theatres full of crowds of all ages who had no idea what to expect, most of them never having seen a rock band of any kind. We had an interpreter who’d come onstage every three or four songs and translate some interaction with the crowd. Usually by the middle of the show we’d begin to see some kind of physical reaction, starting timidly at first and then spreading like a wave across the room of people nodding and swaying and eventually a few brave folks would start dancing and by the end it would feel more or less like a rock concert. We’d been traveling by bus and train and had taken note of which western music we heard on the radios and in the clubs. We were a bit confused to hear Auld Lang Syne almost everywhere, even though it wasn’t Christmas or New Years. One night in Shijiazhuang we segued into it instrumentally while playing another song and the place instantly erupted into Beatlemania level frenzy. From then on if a show was lagging we’d quote from the song, musically only, no lyrics, and the crowd would go bonkers. Melodies are the same in any language.

The lessons and skills I’ve learned from music are applicable to every part of my life. I’ve learned to be unafraid of, and in fact relish, mistakes for the way they either point to a new unimagined direction or illustrate clearly how not to do something. Musical dissonance has taught me to endeavour to enjoy things which require acquiring a taste for them. Writing and practicing music has sharpened my pattern recognition skills, which are really the essence of learning anything. Liquid lines of harmony inspire me when collaborating with other people on songs or relationships. Counterpoint has given me a model for hosting two ideas at once. The resolve of a suspended chord illustrates tension and release better than almost anything. And so on…

I’ve learned to see and hear music all around me at all times. John Cage’s 4’33 isn’t about silence, it’s about regarding the incidental sounds around us with the awe we reserve for intended sounds. Writing in my apartment in downtown Vancouver I noticed that a lot of the cacophony of sound surrounding me went musically with what I was playing. The beep or a reversing truck, the sirens, the voices etc. would slip in and out of the song’s rhythm like a windshield wiper aligning with the song on the radio every few bars. Having been invited to take part in Canadian Pacific’s Holiday Train, a food bank drive which would have me traveling from Montreal to Vancouver on a vintage train, I decided that if the city could be a musical partner the train would only be more so, inherently musical as it is. I ended up recording in the locomotive, the boxcars, the sleepers… all to the clickety‐clack and whine of the train moving down the rails. I made an album called Two Steel Strings with those recordings. Here’s my impression of a train:

PLAY CATCH MY DEATH

In closing: I’m not great with chronology. I have a hard time attaching years to things, however: when I look back on my career and my life I clearly see each of those eureka moments like a line of lighted lamposts, illuminating and guiding the path I followed this far and shining far enough ahead of me to figure out my next step or two. I am always right after one epiphany and just before the next. Looking back I also see all my musical mentors, instructors, conductors and guitar teachers, who challenged me, encouraged me, kicked my ass when it needed kicking, and inspired me with their enthusiasm, dedication, patience and talent. I salute you and thank you for your important work in helping young people reveal their own creativity, for as we realize this, we truly realize ourselves.

Thank you very much.