When Cathy and I left for Mexico in February 1972, we crossed the border at Tijuana, and took a bus to Mexicali, where we boarded a train for Guadalajara. On the way home, though, we crossed the border at Nogales, Mexico, approximately 600 kilometres east of Mexicali — which meant that when we entered into the United States, we landed in Nogales, Arizona rather than San Ysidro, California.
Whatever the case, we were happy to be heading home.
Once in Nogales, Arizona, we stopped in at a popular local diner for breakfast (it was approximately 8 a.m.), after which we headed over to the highway, where we stuck our thumbs out, hoping for an 85-mile ride to Tuscon, Arizona, all dusty and laden with backpacks, of course.
A kind young man picked Cathy and I up just outside of Nogales, and as luck would have it, he was on his way to Tuscon. Once we’d loaded our backpacks into the back seat, and were comfortably ensconced in his late model Ford sedan, as we barrelled down the I-91 highway heading north, he turned the radio on. After two months away, the song that follows just below is the first song we heard on American radio, a song that would soon rise to #1 on the charts, and which Cathy and I remember to this day as signalling the first jaunt of our journey home, to Los Angeles initially, and then to our home atop Burnaby Mountain, at SFU’s Louis Riel House.
Somehow a song about the desert as we trundled our way through southern Arizona on a warm, breezy, dusty sun dappled Tuesday morning seemed entirely fitting — Cathy and I just looked at one another & smiled.
Once in Tuscon, we once again put our thumbs out at the side of the highway, and soon found ourselves on the second, 113-mile leg of our journey home, this time to Phoenix, and afterwards on the last leg of our route back to our friend’s home in East LA, a 372-mile ride to from Phoenix to Los Angeles. We made it back to Los Angeles around 8:30 p.m.
In fact, we arrived in the Westwood neighbourhood of Los Angeles, where our friend Bachi (Manuel Vittorio Esquivel) was kind enough take the 22-minute drive from East L.A. to pick us up, and bring us back to his home. We stayed a couple of days, and then jumped into our Datsun 510 — a wedding present, as it happens, and a vehicle that Bachi had serviced in our absence, all in prep for our 1277-mile leisurely sojourn to Vancouver.
The holiday season is upon us. For VanRamblings that means spending time with friends and family (as I suspect is the case with most of us), and a level of busyness that is unusual for us — given that much of our life is given over to the creative endeavour of writing on VanRamblings, which entails a dozen hours or more each day sitting in front of our computer composing the posts that you read from time to time, on this blog of ours.
From April 20th on of this year — six months out from the 2018 Vancouver municipal election — there was a raison d’être for VanRamblings: to introduce you to the candidates we felt were worthy and deserving of your vote. To that end, we wrote as many as 2500 words each day about the 2018 Vancouver municipal election, the issues we felt were important for candidates to address, and who we felt best were most capable of creating the city we need, a fairer and more just city for all.
While it remains our intention to continue our coverage of Vancouver City Council, School Board and Park Board, we are not quite so obsessed with civic governance and all that occurs each day with the process of decision-making that will lead to creating a city for all of us. In Vancouver, we’ve elected our Mayor, Kennedy Stewart, and a pretty darn fine group of City Councillors, School Board trustees and Park Board Commissioners — we’re prepared to let them get on with the job sans the obsessive coverage that has come to define VanRamblings these past almost eight months.
Damara, our new 3-year-old kitty, soon to be our companion as we write each day.
Here’s our plan for VanRamblings, then, going forward, which, of course, is subject to change — we’re planning on writing about politics once or twice a week this month. We have a column on Janet Fraser, Chairperson of the Vancouver School Board, that we’re intending to write, with likely publication this upcoming week (for the record, we consider Dr. Fraser to be a transformative political figure, and believe we should all be grateful for the gift of her presence on Vancouver’s political scene). We’ve also got a column on Vancouver International Film Festival programmer Tom Charity’s Best of 2018, which it is our current intention to publish next Friday.
In fact, VanRamblings will publish a great many columns on film this month — because we love film, considering it to be the art of our age, and during the April through October period we forfeited our love of film in favour of covering the election — where the majority of candidates we endorsed were elected to office, as well as a few we failed to endorse, but should have.
As far as is possible, in addition to our once or twice a week political coverage, we’ll keep up our Arts Friday coverage — which will be given over to film for the foreseeable future, but within which we plan to expand our coverage into other facets of Vancouver’s arts scene. We’ll continue our Stories of a Life feature — no such posting this week, or last, but next week we promise — and our Music Sunday feature, which tomorrow oughta emerge as a sort of Story of a Life when, and if, it actually comes to fruition. Tuesdays and Thursdays may be fallow days, or given over to tech coverage — we have a column for Apple iPhone SE, 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7 Plus, 8, 8 Plus, and X users we’ll publish this upcoming Tuesday.
In the new year, VanRamblings will finally write about our cancer journey — which “story” will begin 10 months prior to our official cancer diagnosis. We’ll introduce you to those who made a difference in our life, and who are — we believe — the reason we are here today, enabling you to read those words on the screen in front of you (there’ll be a great many political folks who will find their way into our reporting out, as our “life savers”).
Thank you for hanging in with us.
Going forward, it is our intention to remain relentlessly positive about pretty much darn near everyone and everything, while focusing on change for the better, and a better life for everyone in all aspects of our lives.
As the year draws to a close, the thoughts of music lovers everywhere is the anticipation of the discovery of new music made extant through the publication of the various year-end lists by respected music critics of the best new, under-the-radar music releases of the previous 11 months.
Such was the case during the holiday season in 2000, when the then not-discredited Charlie Rose had on the then not-discredited longtime New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones on his show to discuss the best albums of 2000. Mr. Frere-Jones found himself able to talk about one artist and one artist alone: Kasey Chambers, a then 23-year-old woman raised in the southern Australian outback who, he insisted, had released the best album of the year, the best country album he’d heard in years. Mr. Frere-Jones could not help himself from extolling Ms. Chambers’ many virtues as a singer-songwriter, going on to insist that Mr. Rose, and his other guests around the table that evening — and everyone tuned into PBS’ The Charlie Rose Show first thing the next morning repair to their local record store to secure, or order, Kasey Chambers’ début album release, The Captain.
Enthusiasm exhibited by a usually taciturn critic is a rare commodity at the best of times — critics being a cynical lot, by nature — leaving the viewer of that evening’s episode of The Charlie Rose Show no option other than to purchase The Captain first thing the next day — which, of course, I did.
Kasey Chambers’ music is timeless, as is the case with every song on The Captain. If you’ve not heard The Captain prior to this, you can listen to each of the songs on the album through YouTube, after which I assure you, you’ll want to download the entire album, and make it a part of your music library, and the soundtrack of your life, going forward. Important, really.
Click or tap on this link to listen to & savour Kasey Chambers’ The Captain in its entirety
Kasey Chambers was born in Mount Gambier, the second most populated city in South Australia (urban population: 28,684) early on the Friday afternoon of June 4th, 1976, the younger sister of brother Nash, who was born in 1974. Kasey’s parents, Diane and Bill, were musicians, itinerant farmers and hunters, who wanted nothing to do with big city life.
Mount Gambier’s crystalline Blue Lake
As money was often tight, on the few occasions when the family came to town, given that all members of the family were fine, well-respected musicians, arrangements were made for the family to play a series of concerts, the monies earned enough to pay for supplies until the next time the Chambers family came to town. By 1986, when Kasey was only 10, the family had formed a band called the Dead Ringer Band, so-named because Nash and Kasey looked like younger versions of their parents.
From the outset, it was clear to anyone that heard Kasey Chambers that she was a preternatural talent, Kasey Jo Chambers providing vocals and writing songs for a series of albums released by her parents between 1987 and 1993. When interviewed by the press — word of Kasey’s talent spread quickly across Australia, almost from the outset — she often cited Emmylou Harris as one of her primary influences, recalling that Harris’ music was frequently played by her parents, ever since she was a child.
Kasey Chambers recorded her début solo album, The Captain in July and August of 1998, with her brother Nash producing, and her father Bill on guitar (her parents were in the throes of divorce, so mother Diane played no role in the recording of the album). Joining the family on the recording were American country musicians, Buddy Miller and Julie Miller, who added guitars and vocals to four tracks. The Captain was released in Australia in May 1999, and worldwide, in June 2000 by Asylum Records.
And, as is often said, the rest is transcendent & salutary musical history. Cry Like a Baby went on to win the country music Song of the Year award in 2000, The Captain winning the same award the following year. The next year, Kasey Chambers toured across the globe as the supporting and opening act for Lucinda Williams, who was touring to support her breakthrough, multi-award winning album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.
At my insistence, my friend J.B. Shayne (not a fan of country music) and I attended the Lucinda Williams concert at The Vogue in late 2001 — a three-hour concert that blew the roof of the venue — J.B. commenting to me afterwards, “That was like attending a Doors concert. I don’t think I’ve ever heard better musicianship. Lucinda Williams and her band (two drummers / percussionists, two lead guitarists, a rhythm guitarist, a slide guitarist, an organist, and a pianist) are probably the finest band I’ve heard in years. It’s maybe the most stoned concert I’ve ever attended.” And so it was.
Kasey Chambers, of course, was the opening act — and proved to be everything and more that I’d promised J.B. Within minutes, she had the audience in the palm of her hand, clapping, cheering, shouting, and head over heels in love with this Aussie girl who just knocked their socks off, not only performing most of the songs off The Captain, but previewing songs from her new album, Barricades & Brickwalls, produced by her brother Nash, the song Not Pretty Enough going on to win CMA Song of the Year.
From the late 1960s on, I have been gifted with having a series of publications publish my music reviews. My love for music started much earlier than that, though — in all likelihood, probably from the womb, because my mother loved music, our home filled always with the popular music of the day, which seemed to give my mother life, and succeeded almost always in bringing joy into our home.
The gift of the love of music was passed on to my children, by both their mother and me, both of us from an early age finding succour and sustenance in music that embedded itself into the lifeblood of our lives.
My son, Jude Nathan Tomlin, extended our family’s love of music beyond mere singing in the home, or playing music on the home or car stereo: Jude makes music, and has traveled the world as a progressive house D.J., playing his own special brand of house music. Most, if not all of his music collection is on vinyl, because he (and many others) experience the sound of music that emanates from vinyl as fuller, warmer and more intimate.
Over the years, every now and then, Jude would run across a piece of music that was not intended to be digitized, and had not been digitized, but as he knew that almost all of my music is either on CD, DVD or mp3, Jude would take pity on his poor dad and convert the vinyl “song” he had discovered into a high quality mp3 to add to my music collection (although he’d find the juxtaposing of the words “high quality” and “mp3” a curious construction indeed, and mutually exclusive concepts … still and all …).
Even today, I could not find Transglobal Underground’s remix of Dub Tribal’s Elastic Reality anywhere as an mp3, or on YouTube, so I uploaded the “song”, which you’ll find at the top of today’s Music Sunday column.
I recall one day not all that many years ago, when Jude arrived home from his travels, his sitting down at my computer, whereupon he added Transglobal Underground’s remix of Dub Tribal’s Elastic Reality to my iTunes music collection, and subsequently to my iPhone’s 5000+ song collection of music. I find the song calming, as does Jude, and as he knew I would.
Jude continues often, if less often than previously, to provide me with the gift of music, as he did some years ago with the second song on today’s Music Sunday roster, an historical piece of music by The Art of Noise, featuring the late British actor John Hurt performing the narrative vocal, the song about Claude Debussy, titled, The Holy Egoism Of Genius.
