Jason Schneider

In the Pines

Jason Schneider strikes a refreshing tone in his latest book Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music from Hank Snow to The Band. The book stands as an investigation of how twentieth century Canadian songwriters influenced the course of popular music both inside and outside their country, and what specifically it is in the songs that speaks in a distinctive way.

Schneider cuts an ambitious swath across the field of Canadian music. Early in the book he outlines nicely the careers of Hank Snow and Wilf Carter. Later he offers unique understandings of the work of Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. Perhaps his most absorbing chapters are those focusing on Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks, and the subsequent career of The Band. Along the way he reveals some interesting connections between Canadian and American artists, specifically the mutually beneficial relationship between Gordon Lightfoot and Bob Dylan. “I wasn’t really writing this book for a particularly Canadian readership,” Schneider explains. “I was thinking more of hopefully appealing to fans outside Canada, fans of these artists who possibly don’t know these stories, like the relationship between Dylan and Lightfoot and the influence they had on each other.”

Certainly the book offers Canadian readers a concentrated study of some of the best songwriters that this country has produced. Simultaneously it goes a long way toward helping readers outside Canada to understand better the Canadian imagination. What makes Whispering Pines particularly intriguing is that Schneider never makes any grand pronouncements on the overarching meaning of Canadian music. He offers facts, chronologies, stories, and a myth or two, but ultimately he leaves it up to the reader to decide what to make of it all. This is rather liberating!

In the following interview, Schneider does offer more directly some of his own insights. One fascinating and disquieting element in the tradition of songwriting in Canada is the overwhelming sense of spiritual displacement and outright loneliness that is present in many of our greatest songs. Schneider suggests that this component of the music cuts in two different ways. First, for many Canadian musicians trying to establish themselves, there was a feeling of complete isolation and lack of opportunity at home. This resulted in the pressing need to escape in order to be heard. Second, once relocated, most often to the United States, many artists experienced a different but equally profound loneliness, a condition stemming from homesickness and the absence of familiar landscapes. In the song ‘Whispering Pines’ by Richard Manuel, this dual displacement is perhaps expressed most poignantly. It is no coincidence that Schneider borrowed the title of the song in order to name his book.

Beginning with the question of what has been most intrinsic to the work of Canadian songwriters, the interview turns ultimately to the interesting matter of what the fundamental sound might one day become. Schneider mentions current bands such as Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire. In a country with an ever evolving, complex, and at times virtually inscrutable identity, it is fascinating for Canadians to dig in and think about what our best musicians have had to say about the country. With Whispering Pines, Jason Schneider should provoke a renewed national discussion.

CI: The book is named after the Richard Manuel song, ‘Whispering Pines’. There is a spot near the end of the book where you wrote that “… ‘Whispering Pines’ hung in the air, largely due to Hudson’s unearthly organ tone, but also because of Manuel’s unparalleled ability to convey a sense of spiritual displacement that comes from utter loneliness.” From your perspective, is this something that is intrinsic to Canadian music, specifically this sense of spiritual displacement? Is that why you picked ‘Whispering Pines’ as the title?

JS: Well, to answer the loneliness part, yeah, I do think that loneliness and displacement play a huge part in whatever the Canadian sound is. That is just something that can never be explained definitively, but just looking at all the great songs from that era, from ‘Four Strong Winds’ to ‘Early Morning Rain’ to Joni’s early stuff to ‘Sugar Mountain’, to me, that’s the thing that connects them all – loneliness, just feeling completely isolated within the universe. All these people, when they got serious about being musicians, they were faced with this complete lack of opportunity within Canada, once they got to a certain point where their ambition took over. That’s possibly one theory that plays into it. From what I’ve read about other Canadian artists from that time, from the fifties and sixties, all of them seem like they wanted to get out of Canada by any means necessary. They just didn’t feel like there was any opportunity for them to do anything here, anything meaningful.

CI: The spiritual displacement then comes early on in Canada from a feeling of not being where they want to be. Is there a second displacement that comes once they leave, and maybe they go to the U.S. and again feel disconnected?

JS: Absolutely, and I think that plays out especially in Neil and Joni’s stuff once they get to California. Even in Buffalo Springfield, Neil was completely cynical about what was going on in L.A. – ‘Mr. Soul’ is all about how shallow the L.A. scene is, and the groupies that were after the band. And of course he writes ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ around that time: ‘I think I’d like to go back home’. Over the next few records, those feelings come out more and more. And Joni too, by the time she does Blue, a lot of those songs deal with homesickness. So it did kind of cut both ways.

CI: On Richard Manuel specifically, for people who know the music of The Band but maybe have not gone back and explored the whole chronology of events, his story is a very sad one. Is there something in his story that you can identify as a turning point for when he started to take a downward slide?

JS: I guess, to take it back to the beginning, my original intention for the book was actually to write a Robbie Robertson biography, just something dealing specifically with him because no one had really done it before. He has obviously had a long and fascinating career, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I didn’t want to shortchange the other guys because that’s what The Band was all about – these five guys working together. No one was the leader. When you’re talking about Richard Manuel, that band wouldn’t have been what it was without his voice.

I wrote the introduction about The Last Waltz first, before I even really knew what the book was going to be about. Once I had that opening part done, the more I read it over, I thought, ‘yeah, this book should be more than just about Robbie. These guys deserve something that represents what they were as a group’. And then that just spun off into what the book became.

When you’re talking about Richard Manuel, I think, from what I learned about him, he was just one of these troubled people from his teenage years. He had been drinking heavily since he was twelve years old, as far as I know. When you talk about people who are able to convey emotions like that, inevitably there’s a lot of damage and conflict underneath the surface. That’s something that has always been hard to discuss within the context of Canadian rock because people don’t want to cause too many waves within Canada, just because the industry is so small. Everyone knows each other. I heard Gord Downie give an interview just last year where he sort of alluded to that. The Canadian music industry gives people passes more than they deserve because it is so interconnected.

So yeah, it was kind of hard to explore everything about Richard Manuel’s life just out of respect for his family and for guys like Garth Hudson, who still really sticks up for Richard and wants people to know how talented he was. It is still kind of hard for me to talk about that.

CI: On the book in general, or on your approach to writing it, I found in reading it that you presented facts, revealed the interconnections between people and some of the origins of the songs, and the stories associated with the songs, but you never made any attempt to convey ‘the meaning of it all’, which I found refreshing. I thought it was nice to be able to read it and come to my own conclusions. Did you give much thought to how you were going to present it?

JS: Actually no, I think it was a conscious decision not to do that. Pretty much all the reviews I’ve read, that’s what people go after right away – ‘oh, he didn’t answer the big question!’ Well, you know, that’s not what I really wanted to do! I wasn’t really writing this book for a particularly Canadian readership. I was thinking more of hopefully appealing to fans outside Canada, fans of these artists who possibly don’t know these stories, like the relationship between Dylan and Lightfoot and the influence they had on each other. I don’t think any of these artists too particularly felt that they were doing anything ‘Canadian’ with their work. It was like that quote from Greil Marcus that I used from when I interviewed him. He said that The Band made the kind of music that they did when they were in Woodstock because that was as close a representation to southern Ontario that they could get without living there. The same thing when he talked about Neil Young: he saw Neil as being more of a Californian than he [Marcus] was, just because Neil now had this kind of outsider’s perspective on what was going on. So I don’t think this generation of Canadian musicians really did anything particularly ‘Canadian’, apart from just being sort of a filter for this music that they loved and shaping it through their own sensibilities. That to me is really the answer. They didn’t grow up within a culture of Canadian art because that didn’t exist. Nobody knew what Canadian art was back in the fifties and early sixties.

CI: That’s an interesting comment. When I was in Vancouver in the summer I interviewed Tony Dekker of Great Lake Swimmers. They recorded most of their recent album, Lost Channels, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario in the Thousand Islands region. I asked him if he was trying to cultivate a sound that was somehow representative of Ontario or of that region. He said that he hoped there was something larger than that going on, but he was always happy to hear people say that it fit into the Canadian tradition of music. From your perspective, is that something that Richard Manuel or Neil Young just would never have said?

JS: Oh absolutely, and there is a quote from Robbie Robertson in there saying that he didn’t feel that there was anything that could be defined as Canadian music. It was a quote that I found from the early seventies. He said the closest thing that he could think of was kind of the Québécois-Cajun style that they implemented a bit on ‘Rag Mama Rag’, but other than that, like he said, as far as he was concerned, there wasn’t any Canadian music. That’s obviously changed now, and I think in large part just through these artists.

The big turning point that I’ve realized everything hinged around was Expo ’67. That was the great awakening where people sort of finally took a stand and said ‘this is what Canadian culture is’. Prior to that, there was no music business within Canada to speak of. Most of the labels were just acting as distributors for American labels. There were a few independents, but anyone with any designs on making money in Canada were not looking at selling records specifically in Canada until the CANCON laws got enacted. That’s when things really started to change.

CI: There is a bit of a flip side to the coin, I think. Recently I talked to Tim Hus, who is a country singer based in Alberta, and he opened shows for Stompin’ Tom Connors this past summer. Tim tells this story about being on the road with Stompin’ Tom, and Connors tells him that he is very happy that he has now found someone finally who is doing something similar to what he does. Tim sings songs about the oil patch and loggers, and towns like Flin Flon, Manitoba, really Canadian songs about Canadian people, which is what Stompin’ Tom has done over the years. The interesting comment in this is that Stompin’ Tom said that, before him, only Wilf Carter really did that. Is that an accurate assessment?

JS: Yeah, for sure. Wilf became the logical starting point for this whole book, just because he was the first Canadian songwriter to record his own songs within Canada. His whole success in the States was really just a fluke. He didn’t have any ambitions to become a famous singing cowboy down there or anything like that. He just loved to sing and make records, and it was just through other people, and through these opportunities that fell in his lap, that he became a recognized name in the States. But yeah, if you look at his catalogue, he wrote songs about all areas of Canada. He was from Nova Scotia, but then he became associated with Alberta and the cowboy life out there. And to this day, people are still devoted fans of his just for that reason. He was the first guy to really write songs that people within Canada could identify with. So yeah, I think it’s totally accurate for Stompin’ Tom to say that.

CI: One of the twists of fate in Canadian music is this really random connection between Arkansas and Ontario, when you have Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm coming up here. In the book you tell the story about Harold Kudlats in Hamilton, Ontario, orchestrating this movement. You have an interesting line about Hawkins: “What Hawkins inherently understood was that rock and roll could only thrive when it engaged audiences on a primal level, and it didn’t take long for him to seduce Canadians with his reality of what it meant to be American.” I thought that was an interesting sentence. How would you characterize this primal Americanism that seduced Canadians?

JS: I think there has always been this inherent redneck tendency within Canadians that, for whatever reason, people had never expressed. When Ronnie Hawkins arrived and sort of allowed people to express themselves that way, I think that’s when it started coming out a bit more. Again, I can’t speak from personal experience, but when I interviewed Harold, that’s what he told me. He said that the reason Ronnie caught on so quickly is that no one had heard live music like that before. It just completely opened people’s eyes, and freed them in a weird way, I guess. Not in any artistic way, but just ‘oh, okay, so we can get rowdy on a Saturday night? Let’s do it!’

CI: One of the things that Ronnie Hawkins might not get enough credit for, but you mention in the book, was his ability to spot talent back then. When the different members of The Hawks were in different bands, he recognized who he needed to bolster his own sound.

JS: And I think that was necessary for him. I’m sure he knew his own limited abilities as a musician. He needed to have a great band backing him up. I think I have a line in the book where I describe him as a bit of a con man. He’s got a bit of that in him. And I stand by that! I think he came to Canada thinking that ‘this is wide open territory for me to plunder, and I’m going to take advantage of that as much as I can’. Once he started recognizing these young musicians who were really looking up to him as the real deal – ‘hey, we’ve finally got a real rock and roller that we can look up to and connect with’ – he saw the opportunity.

Initially he approached Robbie Robertson not as a guitar player but as a songwriter. When Robbie told him that he’d written a couple of songs that he thought Ronnie could record, Ronnie said ‘okay, here’s a teenager writing songs; logically, these songs should connect with other teenagers’. Over the course of his recordings throughout the sixties, he tried to do country music, and he tried to do folk music. He was just a plain opportunist in a lot of ways. Robbie has got a lot of that in him too. I tried to make that point in the book. It was just people scrounging for whatever they could do just to make money. That’s an important point: there was little money to be made. Once Ronnie got a little taste of success, he tried to hoard that all to himself. Money! It’s always been a motivating factor. At that time, it definitely was.

CI: In the book Bob Dylan comes up again and again. Obviously the book is about the influence of Canadian artists on North American music, but here you have an American artist who has had a tremendous influence in the other direction, on Canadian musicians: The Band, Gordon Lightfoot, and even the story of Leonard Cohen going to see Dylan and The Hawks in 1966. How do you characterize his impact on the Canadian artists that you studied?

JS: Well, I like to think – and of course, this is all speculation – but I like to think that Bob heard a quality, beginning with Ian Tyson - I think he heard a quality in his songs. Probably even going back to Hank Snow. It’s hard to say if Bob really knew that Hank was from Nova Scotia or not, or if it really mattered. But I think he heard something in those songs that, in the early sixties, when Bob was being held up as the spokesman of his generation, as the ‘protest singer’, that he heard in these songs something larger, larger ideas being conveyed – maybe not larger, but more human ideas – something a lot less tied to the politics of the day, or people writing topical songs. I like to think that anyway. I know that Ian Tyson said that he wrote ‘Four Strong Winds’ partly inspired by Bob’s work, but at the same time that was a song that Bob would play later on in his career, too. He became close friends with Ian, and they shared a lot of ideas together. When Lightfoot comes into the picture with his take on the relationship song, I think that had a big impact on Dylan. His songs about relationships had been fairly cynical and one-sided, I think, but then to hear Lightfoot really get deep into that, maybe not until the early seventies – this was something that never really occurred to me until I listed to Lightfoot’s work seriously – but then to hear the obvious impact that that had on Blood on the Tracks. If you listen to Blood on the Tracks after you listen to the three Lightfoot albums that came before that, it’s obvious – Gordon’s work at that time had a huge impact on Bob. I don’t think Blood on the Tracks would have been what it was without Lightfoot’s work. Anyway, I think I’m getting off track a bit …

CI: No, it’s interesting, but let me put my last question to you, just a little bit of speculation to wrap up. Say you’re twenty years in the future and you’re going to write, not a sequel to this book necessarily, but something similar to it – what artists are you hearing right now that you think are the strongest representatives of the Canadian sound?

JS: The first guy that comes to mind is Ron Sexsmith. I think that he’s the natural heir to all this music. I don’t think he’s capable of writing a bad song. He’s got that typically Canadian demeanor about him too, which may be a hindrance for him later on. Looking back at it though, his catalogue is going to be important down the road. Blue Rodeo, of course – they are kind of foremost in my mind right now. I’ve been doing a big article on them. Their new album that just came out I think is their strongest work in years. When everything is said and done, their records are going to be meaningful to a lot of people. Who else? Maybe give me a minute!

The whole Canadian songwriting tradition is now pretty ingrained in a lot of kids. I still remember singing ‘The Circle Game’ in elementary school music class, and that was really my first connection to Joni Mitchell, which I didn’t even realize. Neil Young’s music, of course – any kid writing songs right now references Neil Young in some way. So whether for good or bad, that group of musicians really is what Canadian music has come to represent. Now, if you’re talking twenty years down the road, it’s entirely possible that the whole Broken Social Scene, the Arts & Crafts group, and Arcade Fire – all that is eventually going to displace a lot of this stuff as what the Canadian sound becomes. But I think, for now, this generation is what has been feeding Canadian rock for the last fifteen or twenty years.

Date of Interview: 11/07/2009
Location: Ethel’s Lounge, Waterloo, ON
Link: http://heartbreaktrail.wordpress.com/