Music Sundays | Laura Nyro, and Christmas & The Beads Of Sweat

October 25, 2020A & E, Music, Pop CultureRaymond Tomlin

On this post election Sunday, a needed and necessary break from politics.
Last Sunday, October 18th, would have been beloved American singer-songwriter Laura Nyro’s 73rd birthday, born Laura Nigro on that date in The Bronx, New York. Ms. Nyro passed far too early on Tuesday, April 8, 1997.
Years ago, for me, one of the great joys of my life was playing the breadth of Laura Nyro’s music library during my regular afternoon shift on Simon Fraser University’s CKSF radio, when I was in love with her music, and simply couldn’t get enough of the albums she released, and I softly spun.

Laura Nyro, the song Up on the Roof, from her 1970 LP Christmas & The Beads Of Sweat

A bit of background on Ms. Nyro: As a child, she spent summers in the Catskills with her family, where her father played trumpet at various resorts. She credited the Sunday school at the New York Society for Ethical Culture with providing the basis of her education; she also attended Manhattan’s High School of Music & Art. While in high school, she sang with a group of friends in subway stations and on street corners.
Her father Louis Nigro’s work brought him into contact with record company executive Artie Mogull, and his partner Paul Barry, who in 1966 auditioned a young Laura Lyro, then all of 20 years of age, subsequently going on to become her first manager. Mogull then set about to negotiate a recording and management contract for his young protégé. On November 29, 1966, Laura Nyro released her début album, More Than a New Discovery, for the Verve Folkways label. A song from the album, Wedding Bell Blues / Stoney’s End became a minor hit for Nyro, especially on the west coast.

Later, other songs from the album became hits for The 5th Dimension, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Barbra Streisand.
On Saturday, June 17, 1967, Laura Nyro appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival. Soon afterwards, impresario David Geffen approached Mogull about taking over as Nyro’s agent. Geffen became her manager, and together the two established a publishing company, Tuna Fish Music, under which the proceeds from her future compositions would be divided equally.
Geffen also arranged Nyro’s new recording contract with Clive Davis’ Columbia Records, and purchased the publishing rights to her early songs.
The new contract allowed Nyro more artistic freedom and control. In 1968, Columbia released Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. Eli was followed in 1969 by New York Tendaberry, another highly acclaimed work which cemented Nyro’s artistic credibility. Nyro’s fourth album, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, was released at the end of 1970. The set contained Upstairs By a Chinese Lamp and Been on a Train (one of my all time favourites), and featured Duane Allman and other Muscle Shoals musicians.
In the early 70s, there was no greater reflection to be had on a rainy autumn afternoon up on the fog-bound hill at Simon Fraser University than to be snugly sequestered, and warm inside the tiny broadcast studio at CKSF, lights down, experiencing Laura Nyro’s melancholy Been on a Train.

The following year’s album release, Gonna Take a Miracle was a collection of Nyro’s favourite “teenage heartbeat songs”, and was recorded with the blues vocal group Labelle (Patti Labelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash).

In 1976, Ms. Nyro released an album of new material, Smile, after which she embarked on a four-month tour with a full band, which resulted in the 1977 live album Season of Lights. After the 1978 album Nested, recorded when she was pregnant with her only child, she again took a break from recording, this time until 1984’s Mother’s Spiritual.
Between 1968 and 1970, a number of artists had hits with her songs: The 5th Dimension with Blowing Away, Wedding Bell Blues, Stoned Soul Picnic, Sweet Blindness, and Save the Country; Blood, Sweat & Tears and Peter, Paul and Mary, with And When I Die; Three Dog Night and Maynard Ferguson, with Eli’s Comin’; and Barbra Streisand with Stoney End, Time and Love, and Hands off the Man (Flim Flam Man). Nyro’s best-selling single was her recording of Carole King’s and Gerry Goffin’s Up on the Roof.

Laura Nyro’s final album release, Walk the Dog and Light the Light came in the late summer of 1993, with the song, Oh Yeah Maybe Baby. I remember going down to Zulu Records, when it was located at the corner of 4th and Burrard, with my friend J.B. Shayne, who all but took my hand as he led me into the store, and to the bin where Walk the Dog and Light the Light lay, the album becoming the soundtrack of my life in 1993.

Nyro passed away April 8, 1997, at the age of 49.
She was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010, and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.

Stories of a Life | 1983 | A Sad Political Story | Every Vote Counts

October 24, 2020BC Politics, Politics, Stories of a Life, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

In 1983, while teaching in the Tri-Cities, I also sat as Education Chair on NDP MLA Norm Levi’s Coquitlam-Maillardville riding executive.

Now, I’d known Norm dating back to his days as Minister of Human Resources in Dave Barrett’s groundbreaking NDP administration, when he was the government’s liaison to the grassroots Tillicum and Fed Up co-operative movement where I was the Executive Director, a co-operative movement which not only initiated the distribution of organic and natural foods across the province, but fundamentally changed the eating habits of British Columbians, and was instrumental, as well, in establishing the first worker-run co-operative: provincial recycling initiatives, child care centres, organic orchard, vegetable and poultry farming communities, bakeries, car repair, furniture building, housing construction, and an import wholesaler.

By the time Dave Barrett called a snap election on Monday, November 3rd, 1975, Norm and I had already lost touch with another, when earlier in the year I had accepted a teaching job in the Interior, Cathy, our young son Jude, and I travelling north, where we bought our first home, settling in.

On Thursday, December 11th 1975, when the Barrett government was defeated by the right-wing Bill Bennett Social Credit party — when, earlier, the Socreds had made a commitment to B.C.’s Liberal & Conservative parties to join them in a coalition, offering their elected MLAs Cabinet positions in government — although Norm was re-elected as the Coquitlam-Maillardville NDP MLA, he was no longer in government, and could do little to promote the co-operative movement, as he’d happily done since 1972.

By the time 1983 rolled around, I had completed work on my Masters degree at Simon Fraser University, was sitting on the Coquitlam BCTF Executive, and was working as an English and Drama teacher in School District 43. And, of course, when Norm and I renewed our friendship, he asked me to sit on his constitutency executive as Education Chair.

All was well with the world when Premier Bill Bennett called a provincial election on Thursday, April 7th, 1983. Norm was a popular sitting MLA, as he had been since first being elected in 1968. The Socreds were running a low profile, virtually unknown car dealer by the name of John Parks.

Norm Levi, respected member of the British Columbia Legislature, 1968 thru 1983

The constituency and the provincial NDP immediately went into campaign mode, signing up more than 500 volunteers in Norm’s riding alone.

Money poured in, we had a first-rate, experienced campaign manager in Dawn Black, who would go on to run successfully as an NDP New Westminster federal candidate. Phone banks were set up, the campaign office was bustling, leaflets were printed and distributed by 400 volunteers, and burmashaves throughout the constituency became a fixture on the landscape through E-Day, some two months later, Thursday, May 5th, 1983.

My job on E-Day was to pick up voters for transport to their polling station, the operation efficient and finely-honed, the office buzzing with activity. Throughout the day, I delivered and returned home almost two dozen voters, who were thrilled to re-elect their beloved MLA, Norman Levi.

My final pickup of the day was an 86-year-old woman who lived in the Burquitlam area, with me arriving at her home shortly after 7pm. I went to knock on the door, helped her down the steps of her home and into my car, and off the two of us went to her polling station, gabbing to beat the band, both of us excited about election day and the opportunity to socialize and get to know new people. During our relatively short drive to the polling station, when I drove at a snail’s pace at my rider’s insistence, she gave me some shocking news: she told me that she’d thought about the matter, and as much as she liked and had voted for Norm Levi in the past, just that afternoon she had decided to cast her ballot for that “nice boy, John Parks.”

So, here I was with a Socred voter in my car, transporting her to the polling station so that she could cast her vote for Norm’s opposition. I talked with her about all of Norm’s fine traits, all that he had accomplished over the years, and how Norm was a much better choice for Coquitlam-Maillardville than that John Parks fella — but she was having none of, saying to me, “Are you telling me that I can’t vote for John Parks?”

No, I told her, you can vote for whoever you choose, but I know Norm Levi well, and know that he’ll make a better representative for Coquitlam-Maillardville residents than John Parks, who didn’t even live in the riding.

“Well, get moving,” she said to me, “time’s a wasting, and I want to cast my ballot for John Parks, and that’s all there is to it!”

Now, if I had my wits about me, and was more mature than I was at age 32, I would have taken her home rather than to the polling station, telling her that my job was to take NDP voters to the polls, not Socred voters, that she’d have to make her own way to the polls. But that’s not what I did.

Instead, I drove her to the polling station, and helped her into the polling station for her to cast her ballot. I waited through the time it took for her to vote, and drove her back home, with her full of smiles, and me with a frown on my face — then I headed to the polling station where I’d been assigned to work as a vote count, ballot box scrutineer.

When the final vote count was announced at 10:45pm that cool May 5th evening, Bill Bennett had scored a smashing victory, winning 35 seats to the NDP’s 22 seats, with just shy of 50% of the popular vote, to 44.94% for Dave Barrett’s third time defeated British Columbia New Democratic Party.

How did Norm Levi do in the 1983 British Columbia provincial election, running for re-election in his beloved Coquitlam-Maillardville riding?

John Michael Parks became the new Member of the Legislature for Coquitlam-Maillardville, where he went on to become Speaker of the House in Victoria. And what was Mr. Park’s margin of victory over Norm Levi?

One vote.

John Michael Parks won the riding by the single vote of the 86-year-old woman I had transported to her polling station earlier that evening. One vote had defeated Norm Levi, the incumbent, long-serving and well-respected Member of the Legislature for the provincial Coquitlam-Maillardville riding.

One vote.

So don’t go telling me that every vote doesn’t count — because, as may be seen in the “story” above, every ballot cast & every recorded vote counts.

Take it from someone who knows, much to my everlasting, persistent regret, heartfelt consternation, and ever sorrowful chagrin.

Arts Friday | The Impact of Cinema in Pre-Pandemic Times

October 23, 2020Arts Friday, Cinema, Pop CultureRaymond Tomlin

Nostalgia for a Time When Going to the Movies Was a Pleasure We All Enjoyed
Each and every one of us possess within us memories of our experiences visiting the cinema: as a child of attending at the movies with our parents; our first foreign or independent film with a group of friends; or simply visiting our local multiplex cinema to catch the latest superhero blockbuster, or making the pilgrimage to one local film festival or another.
Pre-pandemic, going to the movies was still a popular past-time, even in an age when media consumption and “film viewing” has radically changed (think of the Netflix revolution). In North America in 2019, there were 1.3 billion cinema admissions — a not-insignificant, nor surprising figure.

In 1930, more than 65% of the population went to the movies weekly. That means for every 5 people you knew, 3 of them went to the movies weekly.
Can you even imagine that?
Eighty-five years ago, cinema-going remained astoundingly popular across the continent, reaching a peak of 1.64 billion admissions in 1946 — even though the North American population was less than half of what it is today.
Why was cinema so popular in times past?
Some of the reasons are fairly straightforward: there was limited opportunity long ago for inexpensive recreational activities outside of the home, television had yet to assert its power, and film was an established medium which exposed millions to different worlds and alluring cultures (or, more often, to the vicissitudes of North American culture).
There was, however, a deeper and perhaps more fundamental reason for movie-going’s immense popularity in North America mid-20th century.
Recent research on movie-going habits in the twenty and 21st centuries has focused on the interplay between space and emotion, and how cinemas act as facilitators of emotional experiences in ambiguous spaces.
Over the years, movies have aided people in helping to reveal new insights into their lives, while allowing a better understanding of the lived experiences of people across the globe, and in their own neighbourhood. Cinema has not only traced our conception of life, but has also served to affect our outlook on life and the lives of others.
Watching a film in the presence of others is different from watching a film alone, or with our family: the collective constellation affects the way viewers experience a film, made all the more obvious once strong emotions and affective expressions come into play: laughter, sadness, shame, anger, screaming, and more often than not (if we’re lucky) being moved to tears.
Different times in history — and different spaces — have served to create new affective landscapes and altered existing ones, making cinema a useful category for historians to study changes in society and culture over time.
The history of cinema has been integrated alongside other sociological methodologies to help form a more refined and complex picture of the past, and in consequence has offered a valuable way of introducing new insights into the establishment of popular culture, and societal development.
The darkness of the cinema environment presents the opportunity to experience a strong shared emotional experience in a public setting, in the anonymous environment of the auditorium. No other public space has facilitated this to such a degree, and this uniqueness reveals how the life of our society developed in specific contexts and in precise locations.
The enclosed and defined space of the cinema auditorium, containing a distinct group in the form of an audience, is an obvious example of community. Patrons in the cinema are aware of both their own emotional response to what they are viewing onscreen, and the feelings of those around them, providing reassurance that our emotional responses to a film are being mirrored by our fellow patrons.
Respected film critic Leslie Halliwell recalled in his memoir on cinema-going that film took “people furthest out of themselves, into a wondrous and beautiful world which became their Shangri-La”.

This utopia was reflected in the very names of cinemas — the Orion, the Rialto, the Plaza, the Regal — and in the architecture of the buildings which encompassed a range of styles including the clean lines of Art Deco and the high theatrics and excess of the “atmospherics”.

The Grandview Theatre, Commercial Drive at East 1st Avenue in Vancouver, in the 1950s

Evidence suggests that many people viewed their local movie-house, whether a stand-alone, second-run neighbourhood movie house or a first-run super-cinema, as a reassuring and familiar space characterized by a hazy emotionality fluctuating between the individual and the group, in the process offering a sense of connection with those who surrounded us.
This ambiguity — the individual vs the collective experience — lies at the heart of what attending at the cinema signifies to people. In few other areas of life are the landscapes of our lives softened to such a degree, in turn making attendance at the cinema a welcoming experience.

Cinemas have long occupied a position on the boundary between the domestic and the public, allowing our emotional experience of a movie concurrently as both communal and private, the evolving emotional landscapes which were crafted by cinema patrons in the mid-20th-century serving to break down anomie while creating a sense of connection.
The fundamentals of our affective experience at the movies has changed little over the past 100 years.
The price of popcorn, however, most definitely has.

#BC Poli | BC NDP | British Columbia’s Natural Governing Party

October 22, 2020BC Politics, PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

With the interim results of the current British Columbia provincial election only two days away, and as per regulations mandated by Elections BC, and as VanRamblings will not be writing about the election in the 24-hour period prior to October 24th, nor on E-Day itself, it’s time for us to weigh in with our wrap-up column on the 2020 British Columbia provincial election.
As VanRamblings has written previously, the B.C. NDP have run a high energy, flawless and humanist re-election campaign that early on defined Liberal opposition leader Andrew Wilkinson as a corrupt, Trump-like tool of B.C.’s wealthy billionaire class, and John “dad” Horgan as your best friend, the guy you’d most like to get together with over a beer, the results of the 2020 B.C. election all but a foregone conclusion in the minds of most.
The B.C. New Democrats will form the next provincial government with a comfortable and comforting majority, with Adrian Dix returning as British Columbia’s much-loved and much-respected, activist Health Minister — and all will be well with the world. Yes, post-election we can all set about to prepare for the upcoming holiday season, with a little more jingle jangle in our pockets thanks to the election commitment John Horgan made, that B.C. couples will receive $1000, and B.C. singles $500, due to arrive no later than early December, along with the promised retroactive rent freeze for renters, that will last all the way through to December 31st, 2021.
In 2020, the B.C. New Democrats have positioned themselves as the progressive, forward-thinking, fiscally responsible, and diverse British Columbia political party that seeks to represent the interests of all wage-earning British Columbians — that’s the vast majority of working people in our province — and seniors, while looking after the interests of families by ensuring the provision of affordable child care, and an education system that will see new state-of-the-art schools built across B.C., and every primary, middle and secondary student attending class in schools across the province that are seismically-safe, where parents will no longer have to fundraise for playgrounds, or fund basic school supplies for their children.
As such, the British Columbia New Democratic Party have positioned themselves as the new, perpetual natural governing party of B.C., supported by an undeniable coalition of working people, union members, parents, small business owners, and members of the LGBTQ2+, Indigenous and diverse persons of colour communities who comprise the British Columbia we all love, where access to opportunity is available to everyone.
The sobriquet “natural governing party” was initially deployed to characterize the success of the federal Liberal Party in the 20th century, the notion of a “natural governing party” well entrenched in the literature on Canadian party politics. The NDP — firmly embedded in the provincial political culture of British Columbia dating back to the days of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in the 1930s, transformed themselves in 1961 to the newly renamed New Democratic Party.

Since 2017, John Horgan’s NDP has developed an image of the New Democratic Party that projects a policy path which both pursues and is congruent with the touchstones of our province’s ethos, while assembling a vigorous electoral coalition comprised of working class persons of European origin, as well as the 31% of British Columbia’s population comprised of persons of east, southeast and south Asian, middle eastern, Latin, central and south American, and African descent, and including the 5.9% of our province’s First Nations’ Indigenous population, while drawing in the young and focusing on the health, safety & welfare of our senior citizen populace, ensuring opportunity for all, and an inclusive B.C. for all of its citizens.

So, let’s take a moment to see how the three main political parties have defined themselves in the 2020 British Columbia provincial election. VanRamblings hasn’t written a great deal about the B.C. Green Party during the course of this election — should B.C. Green leader Sonia Furstenau appear to retain her seat when election results are published on Saturday night, we’ll correct that oversight in a column to be published next week.

John Horgan’s BC NDP are defining themselves as, essentially, an activist, union-supporting version of Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberal party, or more accurately a Canadian version of Joe Biden’s Democratic Party, placing the NDP smack dab in the middle of the political spectrum, taking up the territory where, in 2020, the B.C. Liberals oughta be: promoting diversity and social justice, while also strong on the economy — but that’s not the case, so the empty space ceded to them by Andrew Wilkinson has been taken up by the political party that is set to become British Columbia’s new, natural governing party, a broad, non-scary coalition party dedicated to a strong economy, and focused on health care, child care, Indigenous reconciliation, education, jobs, our province’s thriving cultural sector, public transportation, the natural resources industry, and B.C.’s flourishing green, high tech industry, a low key government ensuring prosperity for all.

The B.C. Liberals, as has become abundantly clear in this election, is liberal in name only. With a name stolen from Gordon Wilson in the early 1990s, the B.C. Liberals have since Gordon Campbell took the reins of the party fashioned themselves as latter day pavement politics Socreds, and in recent years, as (increasingly) far-right-of-centre Reform Party Stephen Harper Conservatives, closely associated with the fear-based politics of Donald Trump and the U.S. Republican party — which, by the way, worked for the Socreds and the B.C. Liberals for years, but with diminishing returns during the course of the 2020 British Columbia election. The B.C. Liberals are a party of the past, not the future. In time, they’ll either fade away, adopt the Conservative name, or re-fashion themselves as the B.C. Party.

Unless B.C. Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau can get herself re-elected in the B.C. NDP stronghold riding of Cowichan Valley — which is a tall order, given that most insider party polling shows her running third in the riding, with both the B.C. Liberals and a surprisingly ungenerous BC NDP wishing her prospects for re-election ill, a salutary future for the B.C. Green Party, and the Canadian Green Party movement, in general, does not bode well — which would be pitiable, indeed. Should Ms. Furstenau fail to win back her Cowichan seat — a possibility which VanRamblings finds to be unthinkable, and contrary to the best interests of British Columbians — the electoral fortunes of the Green Party are done, which would be a tragedy for us all.
Sonia Furstenau has moved Green politics in Canada to where it should have been since the founding of the Green Party movement in Canada: as eco-socialists, as concerned with the welfare of our province and our nation, as with the environment — which, as any thinking person knows, are inextricably entwined. Sonia Furstenau is the great hope of our future.
Should Ms. Furstenau appear to prevail on Saturday night, we’ll expand on the theme expressed above, and set about to dedicate an entire column to Ms. Furstenau and a rejuvenated Green Party movement under her visionary, Jacinda Ardern-like leadership — long overdue and full of hope.

VanRamblings will return next week to conduct a four-part political post-mortem on the 2020 British Columbia provincial election campaign. In the meantime, tomorrow you can look forward to our regular Arts Friday coverage, on Saturday a new Stories of a Life, and then … Music Sunday.