Category: Personal

Great Albums: The Fine Art of Surfacing

The Boomtown Rats – The Fine Art of Surfacing (1979)

The Boomtown Rats – The Fine Art of Surfacing (1979)

There was once a time when “Sir” Bob Geldof was known for something other than organizing huge benefit concerts to feed the hungry. In fact, there was once a time when he was the hungry one. Hungry to find meaning in the world, and to find his place in it. In 1979, Geldof and his band The Boomtown Rats released one of my favourite albums, but the fact that it contained what amounted to a novelty hit (“I Don’t Like Mondays”) consigned The Boomtown Rats to “one-hit wonder” status and left the rest of this masterpiece of angry pop criminally undiscovered. In fact, the album was extremely difficult to find on CD in North America until a 2005 release that added some bonus tracks.

We might as well deal with “I Don’t Like Mondays” right away. Geldof was a former journalist, and you could see why he’d take inspiration from a newspaper account of a 13-year-old California teenager who shot 11 people with no remorse. When asked why she’d done it, she replied nonchalantly, “I don’t like Mondays.” Geldof’s outrage is somewhat obscured by his clever lyrics and sneering vocals, but it’s there. On “Diamond Smiles” he tells the sad story of a rich socialite who hangs herself at a grand party. “When the Night Comes” is about how the office drones try to escape their soulless jobs by fumbling for connection. Whether it’s the emptiness of riches, the incomprehensibility of random violence, or the alienation of our modern world, Geldof was a brilliant storyteller. Almost every song has a character at its centre, someone who is acting out their part in this confusing place. On “Someone’s Looking at You,” Geldof even eerily predicts our surveillance-mad post-9/11 culture of suspicion. This is a brilliant collection of pop songs with lyrics that are actually worth listening to.

Some people were surprised when the sneering Geldof became the ambassador for charity in the mid-80s, but not me. You can’t be born in Ireland and raised in a flawed but still vital Catholicism without emerging as an idealist. A frustrated and angry idealist, usually, but credit to Bob for not just giving up on this messy old world. When I first discovered this album, probably sometime in the 80s, I saw Bob as a great example of someone whose brain hadn’t completely crushed their soul. Even without the knighthood, I’d call him sir.

Track Listing

  1. Someone’s Looking at You
  2. Diamond Smiles
  3. Wind Chill Factor (Minus Zero)
  4. Having My Picture Taken
  5. Sleep (Fingers’ Lullaby)
  6. I Don’t Like Mondays
  7. Nothing Happened Today
  8. Keep It Up
  9. Nice ‘n’ Neat
  10. When The Night Comes

“Someone’s Looking at You” performance on Australian TV on YouTube
“I Don’t Like Mondays” video on YouTube

Great Albums is an occasional feature on Consolation Champs where I relate some personal stories about life-changing music in lieu of any proper music criticism. You’ll probably learn more about me than about music, so consider that fair warning. For more, click the Great Albums category tag.

Four Things

Oh, thank you thank you, Dan! I’ve been tagged and will finally get to fill this space with something:

Four jobs I’ve had:

  1. Door-to-door magazine subscription salesman (1980)
  2. Substitute teacher (1 day in 1993)
  3. Welfare caseworker (1994-1998)
  4. Macintosh computer salesman (1998-2000 and 2001-2003)

Four movies I can watch over and over:

  1. The Big Lebowski
  2. Withnail and I
  3. Tokyo Olympiad
  4. Cinema Paradiso

Four places I’ve lived:

  1. Dublin, Ireland (1965-1967)
  2. Toronto, Ontario (1967-present, with exceptions below)
  3. Grand Rapids, Michigan (1992-1993)
  4. Waterloo, Ontario (19 days in 1997)

Four TV shows I love:

  1. Survivor
  2. The Amazing Race
  3. English Premier League Soccer
  4. NBA Basketball

Four places I’ve vacationed:

  1. Uruguay
  2. Croatia
  3. St. John’s, Newfoundland
  4. Poland

Four of my favourite dishes:

  1. Chicken Vindaloo
  2. Steak Frites
  3. Sage and Garlic Stuffed Pork Roast
  4. Apple and Caraway Stuffed Chicken Breast

Four sites I visit daily:

  1. New York Times
  2. Wikipedia
  3. BoingBoing
  4. Soccernet

Four places I would rather be right now:

  1. Austin, Texas (soon!)
  2. San Francisco, California
  3. Turin, Italy
  4. Havana, Cuba

Four schleps I’m tagging:

  1. Neil
  2. Gord
  3. Paul
  4. Jay

Good Weekend

It started with a work excursion to see the Toronto Marlies on Friday night, which I really enjoyed (somewhat surprising when you consider how much I generally ignore hockey). Then on Saturday afternoon, Brooke and I went to Cinematheque Ontario to see The 400 Blows, which unbelievably, I hadn’t seen yet. An absolutely wonderful film. And then, on Sunday, we invited my Dad over for chili and to watch the Super Bowl, which was actually competitive (plus, my team won!).

The only black spot on the weekend? Chelsea beating Liverpool.

How was your weekend?

Gah! Content Shortage!

I really wanted to post something interesting here for the new year, just because I looked and there are only two entries showing in the past 30 days, so my blog looks completely lopsided. But I have nothing incredibly interesting to share, really.

I started running again, today, for the first time since, gasp, the end of August. I’m keeping track of my slow climb to fitness (again) on my oh-so-interesting running blog. And I’ve been fooling around a bit more with Last.fm, and I can say without hesitation that it’s pretty interesting. At least for completely anal-retentive music geeks like me. View my profile here. While I’m plugging links, my other site, Runner-Up, needs some love. Please visit (that is, if you’re even visiting here!) and if you find something interesting, please please please comment!

That is all.

Great Albums: Whale Music

Rheostatics – Whale Music (1992)

Rheostatics – Whale Music (1992)

Last night, my best friend Brent and I revisited a pillar of our more than 15 year-long friendship. Let me begin at the beginning. I met Brent in 1989. At the time, I was a suave and sophisticated 24-year old who’d travelled in Europe and was beginning my second degree. Brent was a gawky and sometimes abrasive 19-year old know-it-all. Of course, we hit it off right away. When one of my roommates moved out, Brent decided to move in, and for the next three years, we struggled to make ends meet on our student loans and part-time jobs. Sometime in 1992, we caved in to the inevitable and both of us made the humiliating decision to move back in with our parents for a while. Luckily, by 1994 we were back on our feet financially, and we found another place closer to downtown. I moved out gradually as Brooke and I got more serious, but we still live only about fifteen minutes walk from each other.

I tease Brent about not being a “music person” but I am forever grateful to him for introducing me to my favourite Canadian band, the Rheostatics. I don’t even know how he’d heard of them, but one day he brought home a luridly-illustrated cassette called “Whale Music” sometime before we gave up our apartment, and we must have worn it out. Shortly after that, we began going to see the Rheos in concert, and last night marked probably the 15th time we’ve seen them, although I’ve long ago stopped counting. Each year, the band plays a series of shows at the legendary Horseshoe Tavern, and last night was “Whale Music Night”. They played the entire album in sequence, and with a generous encore, the show stretched to almost two and a half hours, but I was never less than transfixed by this transcendent music. As an added bonus, author Paul Quarrington was invited onstage at the beginning of the show to read from his hilarious and sad novel Whale Music which was the inspiration for the title of this record. (In a strange twist, the Rheostatics were invited to provide the score for a film made of the book, so there are actually two albums of theirs with the title “Whale Music”.)

It’s difficult to describe the music of the Rheostatics. For this album, there were four different songwriters, and four vocalists, but more than any other of their records, it feels like one piece. I’m a huge fan of guitarist Martin Tielli, and his compositions feel the most orchestral and moody to me, and I think that’s what ties the whole thing together. All the band members are insanely gifted musicians, but in addition, Tielli is a talented painter who’s created all the band’s album covers, and singer/guitarist Dave Bidini is a well-known writer who’s written books about hockey, baseball and rock music. I’ve had the privilege to meet the painfully-shy bassist/singer Tim Vesely on a few occasions, and I’ve always been impressed by the fact that no one in this band shows even a shred of rock-star ego.

Whale Music begins with a song called “Self Serve Gas Station” and it sounds vaguely like a country song. I’m surprised that I stuck with it, since my problem with most Canadian music (especially bands like The Tragically Hip) is that I think they sound too “twangy”. But I was immediately drawn in by the strange lyrics (“He wanted to bust the glass because I wouldn’t give him gas, I said ‘You shouldn’t even be driving'”). My favourite tracks are the ones by Martin Tielli, and “California Dreamline” might be my favourite song ever (“questionable things like dolphins helping people to swim”) and reinforces my feeling that Martin’s songs are always somehow related to water.

I could keep going but I think the best thing would be for you to let this album wash over you personally. There’s a line in the stunning end-of-album closer “Dope Fiends and Boozehounds” that references Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”, another seminal album for druggy kids of my generation. This album is sort of like that. Listen to it in a darkened room from start to finish and tell me that you don’t agree that this is the Greatest Canadian Rock Album Ever.

One of the great things about living in the 21st-century is that it’s now possible for more people to hear this wonderful music. You can download the whole beautiful thing for $8.88 right here. Run, people!

Track Listing

  1. Self Serve Gas Station/
  2. California Dreamline
  3. Rain, Rain, Rain
  4. Queer
  5. King of the Past
  6. RDA (Rock Death America)
  7. The Headless One
  8. Legal Age Life at Variety Store
  9. What’s Going on Around Here?
  10. Shaved Head
  11. Palomar
  12. Guns
  13. Sickening Song
  14. Soul Glue
  15. Beerbash
  16. Who?
  17. Dope Fiends and Boozehounds

“King of the Past” video on YouTube
“Shaved Head” video from YouTube

Great Albums is an occasional feature on Consolation Champs where I relate some personal stories about life-changing music in lieu of any proper music criticism. You’ll probably learn more about me than about music, so consider that fair warning. For more, click the Great Albums category tag.