INTERVIEW WITH OLIVER PART 2 - THE MIDDLE YEARS

YOU TALK ABOUT PLAYING WITH IAN BELL AND DAVID WEIR AT SQUARE DANCES. DID THIS CONTINUE IN A WIDER CONTEXT?

Well, I started playing more gigs with Ian Bell, and through him, got to know Anne Lederman, a fiddle player and ethnomusicologist from Toronto. Ian and Anne had a band they called Muddy York. They played historical dance music from 19th century Ontario. For a while, Anne was spending a significant amount of time in Manitoba, collecting material for her Masters Degree on Metis fiddling. She released an amazing scholarly work which promises to be the definitive source on Metis fiddling from hence forth. It comprised 2 double LPs, 8 sides of vinyl of old and current Metis fiddling. She taught me a bunch of those Metis tunes, and they really opened my eyes as to what a crooked tune could do.

While Anne was in Manitoba, I filled in for her in Muddy York, and got to play gigs with Ian. Ian was a very versatile musician and entertainer, and could do many different things well. I learnt a lot playing with him, a lot of repertoire and how to put together a show, for example. Ian was a master at recycling old shows and adding a certain amount of new material, and making it into a new show. It meant you didn't have to reinvent the wheel each time. We were playing some show a t a historical village in Eastern Ontario, and that's when it really hit me: "This is what I want to do." I had never had that thought before in that same way. This time it was for real. If I could get to do that, I would be so satisfied.

AND WHAT ABOUT DAVE WEIR?

Well, Dave was a fiddle builder as a hobby. He was proud of the fact that he competed at the Canadian Open on his own fiddle he had built, playing his own tunes. He introduced me to the Nobleton Fiddle club. The old timers used to get together there once a month and everybody got to play 2 or 3 tunes, with backup. It was a splendid way to get introduced to the real fiddling community. Dave Weir did that for me. He also lent me a little rectangular fiddle when I went to India the first time. The hot Indian sun melted the glue, but he managed to put it all together again after the trip.

DID YOU KEEP IN TOUCH WITH THE NOBLETON CROWD?

Mainly, there was one guy, Norm Gibson. He was a collector of fiddle tunes and a dyed-in-the-wool character. Norm had taken early retirement for running the elevator at the post office, to devote himself to the task of collecting every old tyme fiddle tune ever written. Hew had a big old three tier filing cabinet. One for jigs, one for reels, one for waltzes, filed 'alphabetally', in Norm's words. Norm went to every fiddle party, or 'do'; all the contests, and the fiddle socials, to collect tunes. He had a little Walkman recorder, and would make tapes, sometimes of incredibly poor quality, which I was then expected to decipher and transcribe. For this, he paid me about $2 per tune, plus a special treat with every package of 4 or 5 tunes. The treat would be an old timey sort of thing, like a turnip with the bad bits cut off, or a purple onion. that was really special for Norm. I didn't tell him that I couldn't stand turnips at the beginning, and by the time I knew him well enough, it was too late. I would have meant exposing that fact that I had been living a longstanding turnip lie! So I fobbed off turnips on my roommates for years.

Norm had a million great expressions, and I wish I could remember more of them. I used to drive him up to the Beaver Valley, get off for a few hours at my parents place, and he would drive on to visit his grade six teacher who lived a few miles up the road. He only ever went to grade six, and I think he had a bit of a crush on her. One day we came home from one of these visits, and he came out with the classic line: "Well, we got everythin' done we wanted to do, no-one got hurt or killt or nuthin', so I guess it was a pruddy good day." Norm knew how to enjoy life, and had a more active social life than some of my friends. He used to crash in on parties at my house, to get me to transcribe a tune on the spot, if he was in a big hurry. He was maniacally obsessed with fiddle tunes. He didn't care if there was a dozen of my wildest friends doing strange things, if he wanted his tune, NO SIR, he just marched right in there and got it. He used to say "Call me anytime. I sleep with the phone right by the bed." Lots of my friends began saying that as well. Norm became a bit of a cult with me friends!

Some friends of mine, the Weyman brothers were making a documentary about the Shelburne fiddle contest 'Fiddleville'. I introduced them to Norm, and he became the surprise hit of their show. He was just so darn funny, and so unselfconsciously himself on camera. When it came time to promote the film, they got Norm on CBC's 'This Morning', with Hannah Gartner. I was to be Norm's handler, because they didn't quite trust him to get to the old CBC building on Jarvis by himself. Well the first thing was that Norm saw the production office, and in a loud voice said "This place looks like a G---damn pigstye!" Several eyebrows shot up. He was very impressed with Hannah, though. Said she was a 'sharp cookie'. He told me after the interview "I do believe she could do this for a living!"

And of course, Norm was the guy who said "Love then crazy little things" about stewed tomatoes, of all things! That is the origin of the Stewed Tomatoes name for my group. Read all about it in the Stewed Tomatoes liner notes.

YOU MENTION NORM AND CONTESTS.WAS THIS A PART OF YOUR MUSICAL EXPERIENCE?

Well, I first competed at the Shelburne Canadian Open with my pal Chris. I hardly knew what was going on and it was an eye opener. There I was in front of thousands of knowledgeable fiddle fans, and a fly landed on my fingers..one of those flies that keeps coming back to the same spot, no matter how often you brush it off. I didn't know what to do. I tried shaking the fingers I was not using, and making an extra wide vibrato, but that fly had found exactly where it wanted to be. Needless to say, I did not place. I started competing more in contests when I found out more about how it worked, and just got a little humbler about my place in the fiddle world. I realized that there were so many great fiddle players out there (and I was not one of them). (yet). And I learned a lot at the contests. Competing was one thing. The real fun began after the contest, when all the players would get together for all-night jam sessions. Non-stop fiddling. The best contests were the combined fiddle square dance contests, because then the fiddling had a context - for the dancers who wanted to dance. And if ever there was a lull in the music, a dancer was sure to come along and demand a tune. I would always bring a tape recorder to those events and try to park myself close to a good session and record repertoire. Then I would spend the winter months transcribing and learning this stuff. My favourite player on the contest circuit was a lanky French Canadian called Denis Lanctot. He is an effortlessly brilliant player, and never cared too much about the contest end of things. However, he did know a zillion tunes, and also had the Carignan inflection in his playing, which appealed to me. When off-duty as a fiddler, we would drive around his muscle car and listen to Black Sabbath and the Scorpions! I also hung out with the Schryers, and Brian Pickell, not a fiddler but a great composer of traditional tunes. I never won too much at the contests, but I sure learned a lot.

WHEN DID YOU START TO COMPOSE TUNES?

In the time I was transcribing tunes for Norm, I started trying to write some. It was part of understanding the idiom. Then, through Anne Lederman, I was introduced to Balkan music, and those strange multi-meters really thrilled me. I tried my hand at one of those. Because I busked way too much (12 hours a day) I got tendonitis, and I didn't know what it was, so I kept playing. I finally had to take a break for 9 months. The starvation time. I was lucky I had an understanding landlord. I wrote a tune on paper in 10/8 time. "The Man with No Arms" (that would be me!) and it was a long time before my own arms were well enough to play it. I wrote some other things too. There were some things influenced by David Grisman, and some more sonic tunes. I was so happy when I could write a decent tune and pass it off as a traditional tune at an Irish session. I was still really trying to understand the traditions and to fit in.

WHEN DID RECORDING START FOR YOU?

My friend Jim Ryan who ran the Traverston Band, had a reel to reel TEAC 4 track. That was the first thing I worked on. He let me do stuff on his machine. It started out as pre-production for the Traverston Band album, and I just loved doing it. The Traverston Band album was really my first recording venture. We did it up at Elora Sound with Bill Mather. Then I did some Christmas tapes with my friends Chris Sankey and Dave Stanley. After that I really dove in and began exploring production, though in a basic sort of way. I started recording an album length collection of my compositions (including Man With No Arms) - by this time Jim had graduated to an 8 track. This took me a few hundred hours to complete, and was called Underground Freedom, (referring of course to the subway experience). Jim was unflaggingly generous with his equipment, and just let me do my thing at his house, while he taught school. (Thanks Jim!) Ian Bell helped me with the art work, and Peter Coffman did a bunch of photography. I got 200 copies of cassettes printed up, and I was so proud of this thing. I just thought it would rock the world.

AND DID IT ROCK THE WORLD?

As a matter of fact, no! I didn't realize how darned hard it is to 'rock the world', and I became a little depressed after I didn't get the call from the Tonight Show or Letterman! I thought, "Well, obviously, no-one wants to hear my music." So I stopped writing tunes for quite a while. But I'm skipping ahead. At the time, I was working at Via Rail, answering phones, and I sold a lot of copies to my co-workers. And I was busking, and I sold them in the subway. And I gave a bunch away to people on the Toronto acoustic music scene, who were a little surprised at the appearance of this upstart guy who just sort of popped up from nowhere. I had been busking for years, and hadn't really played with many people. So Underground Freedom did put my name out to a bunch of people in the more acoustic folk scene.

DID YOU EVER THINK OF GETTING YOUR OWN BAND STARTED AT THIS TIME?

I did think, boy, I better get together a bunch of musicians to play this stuff. So I put an ad in NOW magazine, Toronto's entertainment weekly. It went something like "Wild Celtic Balkan swing world fusion multi-instrumentalist looking for other musicians to form band" That was the gist of it, in any case. I got many phone calls about that ad. In particular, there was a marimba and table player called Mark Duggan. And this acoustic guitar player straight out of seminary, with neat short hair, and an original cassette of his own called Kehewin. He was called Don Ross.

DID YOU START PLAYING WITH DON AND MARK?

Well, this would have been about December of 1986. Don and I got together for an exploratory playing session, and really hit it off. Then, Mark joined us and we began playing regularly. We ended up calling ourselves EYE Music. We did a lot of Don's tunes, and a few of mine and Mark's. I still had access to Jim Ryan's recording equipment, and we recorded a demo cassette in fairly short order, and sent it all around to various folk festivals. It was a new thing for me to actually get gigs like that, and it was an exciting time, playing with those guys, even if we did practice in Mark's basement, which was about 10" shorter than I was..

Eye Music began playing gigs at folk venues like the Flying Cloud Folk Club, and the Free Times Café, at such places, even though we were not, strictly speaking, a folk band at all. We did one gig at the Bamboo Club, on Queen Street. We thought we needed some serious bottom end for that gig, so we scooped this bass player called David Woodhead, and he joined us, and just stayed on. We played one or two festivals in the summer of 1987, among them, Calgary, which was rained out as usual. I met several people there - Stephen Fearing, James Keelaghan, Oscar Lopez. all those renegades were just starting out doing their thing in a serious way at that point. The weekend of Calgary was the first weekend I had quit my day job at Via Rail. And I never had a day job again! I had so much fun.

WERE YOU PLAYING EXCLUSIVELY WITH EYE MUSIC AT THAT POINT?

Actually things were opening up for me. I was not doing so much busking any more. Only went out at Christmas time when you could make some serious money. Don Ross had met a wonderful woman by the name of Kelly McGowan about 6 weeks before he had met me. Don and Kelly were getting together to sing Celtic music at first, and then they just plain got together. Of course, I played a ton of Celtic fiddle, so it seemed natural that I would join Don and Kelly in their trip. So I ended up spending massive amounts of time with them. We were family at that point. Kelly was a darn fine cook, apart from singing well, and she used to make us delicious meals. We had this Celtic trio, and we were desperately searching for a name. I remember one night, and several bottles of wine.. We were rolling on the floor in hysterics, actually considering such ridiculous names as the Yonge Bloortones! We eventually settled on the Harbord Trio, because that is where Don and Kelly had met. We also recorded a cassette in Jim's basement (yeah Jim!) and began getting more gigs. And Don was doing some solo guitar gigs. So between busking, Ian Bell, and Don and Kelly in the various configurations, I was busy enough, even if I was broke.

SO WHAT HAPPENED WITH EYE MUSIC?

Well, I fired off the Eye Music tape we had made in Jim's basement to all sorts of festivals, including the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. It sounded good. I didn't really know too much about it. Then one blessed day, we got back the answer that Montreux would love to have us. I was soon apprised of the importance of this thing! The only hitch was that we had to find our own way over there. We all began fundraising, but things were looking slim. SwissAir sponsored us to the tune of one ticket, but there was still a long way to go. Don and Kelly decided that they wanted to get married in Italy after the festival, so Kelly was coming too. Finally, the Native Canadian Arts Foundation came through for us. We were so thrilled at the opportunity. Don was half Scottish and half Micmac, (MacMicmac) so he qualified for assistance.

WHAT WAS MONTREUX LIKE?

It was really surreal. There we were. rube Canadians at the most prestigious jazz festival in the world, playing on the same night as Chick Corea, Jean Luc Ponty, Mongo Santamaria, The YellowJackets. We were on really early in the evening, and we didn't understand European audiences, so we thought we had bombed. Everybody was so quiet. Then they gave us a standing ovation! One of the things everybody got as part of the welcoming package to the festival, was a pack of Lucky Strikes, because that company was a sponsor that year. None of us were smokers, but we all separately went off and smoked a Lucky Strike to celebrate after the show. We stayed up most of the night watching these great bands, slept for a few hours and then watched some more. The music started at 7pm and went 'til about 11am the next morning. Then they kicked us out, and we were suddenly nobodies again! Don and Kelly went to Italy, David Woodhead went to Switzerland to look at trains (he loves trains), and Mark and I hitched to Germany to visit my freaky director/painter uncle Fred, the stuff of family legends.