Songs from the ground up

ELEANOR RADFORD

When the Winnipeg Folk Festival was putting together the lineup for its 40th anniversary show this year, they decided to see if any of the acts that were there the very first time were still around and willing to play. Though the members of Stringband were scattered across the nation, they easily arrived at consensus.

“Everyone said, ‘Hey, that’d be fun,’” founding member Bob Bossin told the Independent from his home on Gabriola Island.

The band formed in 1971, and the reunited lineup, also appearing at this year’s Vancouver Folk Music Festival, includes Marie-Lynn Hammond, Ben Mink, Calvin Cairns and Dennis Nichol. While the band hasn’t played together in a decade and some of the songs’ themes have aged for him, Bossin finds “they have a kind of timelessness, even though they’re not something I’d write now.”

Now widely respected veterans of Canadian music, Stringband were pioneers in their heyday. In an era where acts like Joni Mitchell and Ian and Sylvia needed to move to the United States if they wanted to make it, Stringband was shunned by music labels for sounding too Canadian. The band eventually realized the labels were getting in the way. Bossin recalled asking the audience at shows to “help us make the album by giving us five bucks ... fill out this form and we’ll put your name on the cover.” The 1977 album Thanks to the Following was released with the names of 800 subscribers on the cover. Bossin now sees sites like Kickstarter “replicating what Stringband did on a much larger scale.”

Bossin views crowdsourcing as “different from buying a record, people are involved in the process.... If you’re a performer and have a relationship with your audience where they like and trust you, they’ll jump in.”

Opportunities for participation are something Bossin feels our society lacks, he said. “We’re audiences much more than we were,” he mused. He feared that corporations had succeeded in turning music into a commodity, having long controlled what audiences heard. Then, the Internet came along.

“It gets around all those gatekeepers,” he observed. “Anybody can put something up there and show it to their friends ... and, if their friends like it, they’ll pass it on to somebody else and it really gets out into the culture. It’s not the station manager deciding what will be heard, it’s from the ground up – and that’s what folk music is.”

Glancing at the lineup of this year’s Vancouver Folk Music Festival, one might experience some difficulty producing a clear definition of what is folk music. The artists are from many different countries and the genre boundaries are blurry; there doesn’t seem to be a single, identifiable “folk” sound. To Bossin, “it’s a kind of music that you sing for reasons other than financial or because it’s a popular form of music ... it’s a loose definition.” It’s an art form Bossin fully expects to have a long future. “People will always sing about what’s going on. That’s my definition of folk music, people singing about what’s going on.”

Social commentary is a strong element in his body of work, well illustrated by the band’s feminist anthem “Show Us the Length” and Bossin’s own Clayoquot Sound protest song “Sulphur Passage.”

“It’s a Jewish thing,” he observed. “Folk music has an inordinate number of Jewish performers and practitioners and collectors. It somehow speaks to us.” Bossin was raised in a Jewish home in Toronto and, while he considers himself to be secular, “it can’t help but have a big impact. That kind of questioning, it’s in your bones.”

When Bossin was growing up, his father worked as a booking agent for nightclubs. “He didn’t book strippers and he didn’t book folk singers,” joked Bossin. “The acts would come to our house for Sunday dinner because there wasn’t anything open,” he recounted. This exposure led him to see entertaining as “a fun thing to do – and a legitimate thing to do. Being an entertainer is a direct line to my upbringing.”

Lately it’s his family’s history that has inspired his artistic pursuits. Before becoming a booking agent, Bossin’s father “had been a pretty significant figure in the gambling business in Canada with ties to Chicago and New York, and this was all illegal at the time.”

Bossin has long been fascinated by “a real part of Canadian Jewish history that’s been swept under the rug,” noting that “the gambling business was really significantly a Jewish business, in part because it was the only white collar job Jews were allowed to be in.”

After much contemplation, Bossin set about chronicling his father’s history: “When I turned 60, I had this little epiphany that said, by the time you’re 60, if there’s something you said you always wanted to do and you’re not doing it, you’ve either got to get down to it or admit to yourself that you’d really rather do other things.” His book on the subject, Davy the Punk, is due out in March 2014. He has also performed a stage show titled Songs and Stories of Davy the Punk.

“I’ve historically done what I damn well felt like and then found an audience for it,” is Bossin’s summation of his career. For those beginning careers or deliberating which path to take, he had this advice: “Do what you believe in, because if you do what you believe in and fail, you can still feel good about it. Do what you believe in, develop your craft and see what happens.”

When Emily Lubitz of the band Tinpan Orange was frustrated enough to want to quit music and get a real job, she turned to her dad for advice. “He told me, ‘Just do it for as long as you can; do it until you’re completely tired of it, because what you’re doing is important,’” she said from Australia, before the band embarked on a tour of Canadian folk festivals.

The band, which has released four albums, also features her brother Jesse on guitar. Emily is on vocals and is the band’s main songwriter. “Our dad worked pretty hard to send us to private Jewish school and then we just became folk singers, and to a lot of parents that would be a great disappointment, but he is very proud,” she said.

“There was always music in our house,” Lubitz recalled, and some of that exposure was from the Shabbat dinner her family hosted for years. “For about four or five years, people would come for Friday night service, about a hundred people would come – lots of singing and stuff. I was a bit rebellious; I wasn’t very into it. I’d stay upstairs in my room and read, maybe smoke a cigarette out the window. But deep down I loved it ... hearing the songs. And now I go every week with my son to shul.”

Lubitz’s two-year-old son will be going on the road with her, as will her fellow band member and husband Harry Angus (of the Cat Empire, which will also be performing at this year’s Vancouver Folk Fest). “I feel like the road is my home, especially when I have my son and my husband and my brother there,” she said.

She finds strength in creating with her nearest and dearest. “There is an inherent honesty with people who you’re related to, or you’ve married. It can allow tensions to arise, which I think is probably a good thing. I think ultimately that kind of intimate relationship provides a place for the ultimate forgiveness. I can say things I wouldn’t necessarily say to someone else, and I just know I’ll get away with it.”

Tinpan Orange recently wrapped up an Australian tour supporting a member of a Canadian musical dynasty, Martha Wainwright. Wainwright, the daughter of folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III (and brother of singer Rufus Wainwright), also brings her young son on the road and plays in the band with her husband.

Lubitz found it “a great inspiration to see how happy and well adjusted and connected her child is.” Touring seems to suit Lubitz’s son as well. “He’s a pretty happy guy, going to sound check and having a go on the drums,” she said. “Being on the road can be pretty exciting for a little guy.”

Lubitz sang about the deaths of dozens of animated little guys in a video called “Dumb Ways to Die,” an advertising campaign in Australia for the Metro that implores the public to be safe around trains. The video has been watched more than 50 million times on YouTube and just won the Grand Prix in the public relations and direct marketing categories at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“It’s a little too abstract to really get the enormity of that,” she said of going viral. “It occurred simultaneously with us releasing our latest record, which is pretty independent, we’re not a huge operation, and it’s something I’m incredibly proud of, and then this little song goes nuts and it’s what makes me famous.”

While she believes “the Internet is definitely a great leveler” that can provide artists with exposure, “I also think the most watched things are cats being hit by balls or something. The Internet doesn’t spread quality all the time.” In her case, “I’ve just recorded the album of my life and people know me in association with these little animated guys,” Lubitz reflected.

The lush dreamy music on Tinpan Orange’s latest release, Over the Sun, doesn’t sound much like the folk music Stringband made in the 1970s. To Lubitz, it’s not the sound that makes it folk, “it’s telling stories.” She’s confident there will be a generation following her, proud to call themselves folksingers: “People are always gonna want to tell stories in songs,” she said.

Hazmat Modine, which “delivers a rustic and delirious blend of blues, reggae, klezmer, country and Gypsy-tinged music,” will join Tinpan Orange for a July 20 evening performance on Stage 3. Stringband will play a daytime show (date and time to be announced) during the festival, which runs July 19-21. For tickets, passes and schedules, visit thefestival.bc.ca.

Eleanor Radford is a Vancouver freelance writer.

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