I REALLY BELIEVE THAT THE ART WILL FALL WHERE IT WILL
“If you don’t switch things around you run the risk of becoming a parody of yourself. You kind of become the guy you used to be, right?
How many different hats can one Canadian musical legend wear over the course of his career? Tom Wilson intends to find out. After hitting the big time with the swampified blues and punkabilly rock of Junkhouse, the Hamilton-born Wilson pulled the plug on that enterprise and then threw in his lot with Stephen Fearing and Colin Linden in that adored triumvirate of Canadian roots music, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings. Eight albums in, Blackie is still going strong but about six years ago, Wilson decided to complicate his life a little more by fronting yet another combo – this one specializing in something he likes to call ‘acid-folk’ – under the moniker of Lee Harvey Osmond (sometimes spelled LeE HARVeY OsMOND).
They released their third album this year, Beautiful Scars, and The London Yodeller is presenting them in concert on Saturday, October 17 at Aeolian Hall. We caught up with Wilson on the last Saturday morning in September as he was being loaded into a van, plied with coffee and driven out of Hamilton en route to that evening’s Blackie gig. By his own admission, he looks ‘like a biker’ and he comes on pretty gruff but as you’ll see in the exchange that follows, he’s an affable soul with a tender heart and a touching sense of propriety and the occasion. We got through most of our interview before his phone went dead, leaving me with just one unanswered question that perhaps he’d be good enough to answer at his gig: ‘How old were you and what was it like when you discovered that you had that voice?’
Of course you’re not consistent about it but what is the mixture of upper and lower case letters in LeE HARVeY OsMOND’s name about?
Absolutely nothing. Which basically is what a lot of life is all about. It’s just another roadside distraction, I guess.
There is a certain crazed quality to the name so it sort of underlines that.
Well, it’s funny because people who are particularly self-righteous like to comment on the name. Others don’t give a shit, right? I mean we’ve lived through an era of bands named the Dead Kennedys.
And the Dayglo Abortions.
The idea of the name was really to kind of encompass the generation I grew up in. Growing up in the ‘60s you lived with presidents getting their heads blown off and the radio was always talking about Viet Cong guerillas and on the other side of the coin was this homogenized culture that was being pushed almost like a shiny thing in the left hand, saying, ‘Look at this, look at this.’ North American culture and the world’s culture in general is a pathetic but effective attempt to distract us from the fact that we’re all going to Hell. So that’s where the name came from. It really wasn’t to make fun of anything. It was more a ‘60s social commentary. I thought it was quite clever. I don’t think the rest of the world is on quite the same track or defines ‘clever’ the same way I do.
For all the puerile twaddle of the occasional Osmond / ‘Puppy Love’-type hit, you and I both grew up in an era when the radio could be a fairly exciting and challenging thing to listen to.
It was.
It was very exciting.
And those days are so gone. It seems there’s been such a huge collapse in what used to be the industry. I saw an interview you did talking about when you were just starting out and had a $650 a week gig at a Hamilton fern bar where they sold pizza, and I’m thinking, man, where’s that job today?
That’s true – where is that job today? That was a lot of money back then. But they were actually moving drugs through that restaurant so it was easy. I describe being an artist, trying to create things in this world, as waking up every morning in a bar fight because you have to figure out how to survive and you’ve got to use anything. You’ve got to use your steel-toed boots and your elbows and you’ve got to kick and scream and you’ve got to pick up a chair and hit somebody with it in order to be able to continue to create beautiful things for this world. That’s just how it is for artists. And if you don’t have that attitude then you’re probably not going to survive.
Is this theme of the struggle to survive reflected in the frequent realignments you’ve undergone – starting out as the Florida Razors, then Junkhouse, then Blackie & The Rodeo Kings and even an occasional album as Tom Wilson. Why so many different settings?
I think it has to do with me getting . . . not necessarily bored with what I was doing but wanting to define it differently and not worrying about changing the name as far as business goes. I find it a complete challenge to be Tom Wilson. If you don’t switch things around you run the risk of becoming a parody of yourself. You kind of become the guy you used to be, right? And I didn’t want my art to suffer that way. My art deserved a lot more respect than just being allowed to shrivel out in bar rooms because I wasn’t ready to shake things up a little. That’s why I broke up Junkhouse. I didn’t want it to become something I was just doing for the money and watch the audiences get smaller. I wanted my art to be as respected as it possibly could which, by the way, is a struggle in itself. So I’m happy to discard old projects and start new ones. Lee Harvey Osmond started when Colin Linden got a gig with Emmylou Harris and Blackie had to cancel a tour and we were kind of all looking at each other and thinking, ‘What now?’ And it just happened with the synchronicity of Michael Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies offering me a chance to record with him. That’s how it all fell together I guess about six years ago.
You watch certain musicians who’ve broken away from the act that made their name and tried to make a go of it on their own or as part of some entirely new conglomeration and it’s so hard for them. And after five or six years of flailing away with minimal impact, they go back out on the road with the old group and the inspiration level has just about tanked but damn it – that’s where the money is. You seem to have done a very neat job of escaping that somehow. People accept that you take a number of different forms.
I have escaped it. Junkhouse still goes out. I kept that band in the trunk for 15, 20 years and as a result we can now go out and play for 20 grand a night. We just do three shows and that’s fine with me. We love doing it and it’s not a distraction from my goal of creating new music. It’s kind of like going back to your first or second wife and having a little fling in a motel. It’s a pretty good time and it does really good business.
Of the acts you now head up or are a part of, is Blackie & The Rodeo Kings the biggest?
Yeh, I guess so. Blackie & The Rodeo Kings has managed to be a creative force and the business does pretty good too.
That all started up as homage to Willie P. Bennett. Can you talk about what he meant to you?
What Willie represented for me was fearlessness in art. He also believed that you should never take yourself seriously. You should take your art, your writing, your craft completely seriously, but you don’t have to be a Toronto Queen Street tit about it. You don’t have to take yourself seriously in order to achieve that. And that rubbed off on me. And it rubbed off on Stephen Fearing and Colin Linden in its own way too. It was a starting point for me to discover an artist who had that irreverence about himself and yet was able to produce some of the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard in my life.
Were you looking to give his career a bit of a boost as well as record those great songs?
That really wasn’t the intention. We loved Willie but he was always doing fine. Willie was a survivor. We just wanted to do it because Stephen Fearing and Colin Linden had the idea to do it. They called each other and the same thing came out of their mouths at the same time – ‘We should do an album of Willie P. Bennett songs.” That’s how it came together. It was not thought out deeply. It was just an idea they had and I’m fortunate they called me to be the third guy in the band. So 20 years later I’m still the last guy to join.
And how did Blackie transition to doing your own stuff under that name?
Well, there’s Willie on every album and there’s Willie in every song and everything we do. It’s one of those things – it transcends every period in our lives and whatever era we’re going through. Our whole attitude of how we make music and record is completely inspired still by Willie, right? I used to visit Willie when he lived on top of the Talbot Inn on Dundas. He was a very interesting character.
Is it conceivable you might ever release another album under your own name?
Anything’s possible but I don’t see any need for that right now. I’m 56 and I plan on doing this until they throw dirt on me. It just depends how the spirit moves me.
While I was scouring the interwebs, I came across an hour-long interview you did with the CBC in Hamilton with your son Thompson sitting in . . .
I think that was a guy with a camera in his basement.
But there’s a CBC logo on the wall behind the couch where you’re sitting.
Oh yeh, that’s just a guy . . . I actually think his main job is making porn and once in a while he gets a musician in to sort of talk about themselves.
That’s probably a pretty gruesome couch then?
It is a pretty gruesome couch that you don’t necessarily want to be doing interviews on.
The thing that came out of that interview so strongly was the richness of the Hamilton music scene. And it all made me think of that Rodeo Kings’ song, ‘Lean on Your Peers’.
Right – we’re actually driving past the street that song’s about right now, so that’s quite handy. They have a saying here that ‘Art is the new steel’ which is wishful thinking but it’s still a beautiful thought. In communities where art is created and people are quite desperate and flexing themselves and punching as hard as they can, just looking for the opportunity to express themselves . . . great things happen out of that. It’s kind of like a weed pushing itself through the concrete of a sidewalk. That’s how creativity in Hamilton is born and recognized. There’s still that air of desperation that goes on in the music that’s made in this city. You can find the same thing in Detroit, Glasgow or Dublin or Liverpool or Dartmouth. Any town that isn’t patted on the head for playing the guitar or writing a poem, any bare-knuckled community or city is going to make really great music – that’s all there is to it.
Another thing I saw was your encounter with Miriam Toews on ‘Q’ where you came up with a song called ‘Beautiful Scars’ after releasing your latest album of that name – a song very much based on her novel, ‘All My Puny Sorrows’. What was that like for you to enter into her imaginative universe and try to transcribe her vision into a song?
I’d written that song after reading her book and actually recorded it in January with Blackie & the Rodeo Kings and of course, because I’m such a marketing genius I would put an album out called Beautiful Scars and then later write a song called Beautiful Scars. That’s just how fucked up I am. I have absolutely no marketing strategy. Zero potential of success at all times – that’s how I proudly live my life. The song was inspired while I was reading that book. The creative process isn’t like writing an essay. It’s not like I had to write a book report on All My Puny Sorrows. It’s just that I had to take the parts of that book that resonated with me and express them. That’s it. The one thing we can try to do as writers, artists and musicians is to inspire other people, try to inspire generations to come. That’s probably the greatest gift that we have. It doesn’t pay fuck all but it is one of the greatest gifts. I was coming to do a reading from my own book at an event in Toronto with Miriam and then out of nowhere we were asked to go around to CBC. Well, I wasn’t going to sit and read something from my book and then I remembered this piece of music. I kind of thought they should turn the cameras off because it was one of those private moments for her that I didn’t think should’ve been exploited but the CBC is like every other slut, right?
It was actually pretty darn powerful to see your song’s impact on her.
Yeh. It was powerful to be in that room because she’s an angel, right, and probably one of Canada’s greatest writers – especially for this era. So to have that effect on a fellow artist . . . it was kind of uncomfortable.
I noticed they invited you back to join them at the table and you just stayed where you were.
I wasn’t going back to the table, no. Everything was on camera, right? I thought I would catch up with Miriam after the cameras were off. I didn’t feel like having a moment be exploited like that.
So you do have your own memoir coming out?
I’m working with Random House on a book. They want to call it a memoir and for lack of a better term, I guess that’s what it is. Let’s just see how it falls. The book is living and breathing in real time right now. The circumstances I’m living through right now are going to be the ground floor to the book. Knee jerk reactions – for me, anyways – don’t always work. You get angry, you probably shouldn’t write. You should try to get some perspective on it and I think that’s the job of the artist. We’re not soldiers or politicians, we’re not corporations or churches, and we’re not assholes on Twitter that have to respond to everything. We’re artists. We’re actually allowed to take the time and space to process things and give them a chance to be seen with our vision and our light and that’s what I’m doing with my own life right now.
I thoroughly understand that you don’t want to talk about something that’s being created as we speak, but as someone who’s been waiting the better part of his life for the phone call from a bigwig publishing house, I have to know – did they call you?
Yeh, they called me.
How did you get them to do that?
I did an interview on a show called Definitely Not the Opera about discovering that I was adopted at the age of 53. After thinking that I was this Irish-French guy my whole life, I discovered that I was Mohawk. And then Random House called me and asked if I wanted to write a book. I’d never thought about writing a book and I said, “Fuck no – way too much work.” But I cashed the publishing advance and I’m not giving the money back so I guess I’m writing a book.
And then you’ve got the painting thing going – one of which will be gracing the cover of the ‘Yodeller’.
I started painting the second time I stopped drinking and it’s something that’s more like therapy. If you could actually sell your therapy sessions rather than pay for them . . . I think anybody would want to do that.
What about creative dance or ballet? Do you do either of those?
No. No dancing.
‘Beautiful Scars’ seems to be making more inroads than your earlier Osmond discs.
We’re releasing it in the US and Europe in the new year. It’s funny. For a guy who spends half his life sitting at his desk doing business these days, I really believe that the art will fall where it will. One thing we have the opportunity to do as artists who also have to do business is we can follow the art. Either it resonates with people and you build off that or it doesn’t. I have found that younger people are coming to this record. We did a show in Ottawa last week. I’m 56 and there’s a lot of white haired people in the audience – who are wonderful – but there were all these people in their 20s and 30s lining the front of the stage and that was an interesting thing to see because this is a band that doesn’t usually generate that kind of interest with those audiences. Something that we’re doing is bringing in a bit of a younger crowd. Either that or their parents couldn’t get babysitters.