Three Things from Edmonton podcast - episode 109: Boss, belief, bike




Here are there things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness this week: 

                             

1. Boss 

For those of a certain vintage, and I’m checking my look in the mirror here, word that Springsteen is coming to Edmonton in November calls to mind the saga of Pete The Rocker. Back in the early 1980s, Pete engineered a ceaseless lobbying campaign to get Springsteen to play Edmonton. He wrote letters, he hounded his management company, he put together a 50,000 name petition, which I signed. Pete loved the Boss, that was obvious. He also loved Edmonton, and was open about it, which was different. Edmonton was a place to be from, a place to grow up in, a place to get an oilpatch job, but people my age here didn’t seem to love their hometown like people in, say, New Jersey, or anywhere else did. Pete, who I’ve never met, but whose son also rocks and is a friend, turned the equation around. Springsteen and the E Street Band should come to Edmonton not because they deserved Edmonton but because Edmonton deserved them. Springsteen played Edmonton for the first time in 1992 and again in 2003. I was there both times.


Our youngest son, Michael, played Springsteen as he taught himself the guitar. He still plays, still plays Springsteen, and now teaches us about the roots and offspring of the music. 


The three of us drove to Vancouver to see Springsteen on the Wrecking Ball tour in 2012. We won a lottery and got seats in front of the stage, if standing for five hours straight means you won a lottery, or have seats. What you get is your back burned real good. On the drive home, as we came through Blue River, a dump truck shot back a small boulder that knocked a hole in our windshield. Glass bits on Shelagh’s face and in her mouth. When we got to Jasper, she gave Michael the wheel, the wind through the hole in the windshield blowing back his hair on the road home, as I like to remember it. 


Springsteen has been with us for a lot. I hope we manage to get tickets for the show. Hope prices aren’t outrageous. It would be nice to see us with him again.



2.  Belief 

The trailer for Ted Lasso, season 3, has dropped and they’re back—Ted, Coach Beard, Roy, Jamie, Rebecca, Keeley, Sam, Isaac, Dani, Higgins…and Frank.

The music in the trailer is from I Still Believe, a song from the great punk-singer-songwriter from the U.K., Frank Turner. There’s a beer named Love, Ire and Sour that Darren at Arcadia brews in honour of Turner and his album Love, Ire and Song. A few years ago, Darren asked Frank if he’d be kind enough to play a pop-up show at Boyle Street Community Services ahead of his concert that night at the Winspear. Turner had just released his Be More Kind album. He showed up at Boyle Street with his humanity and his guitar. Shelagh and I stopped by Arcadia for a pint last week. 



“He’s such a good dude,” Darren said of the artist. “What he says, he does, you know what I mean? Joe Strummer was kind of the same, right? Yeah, he’s not messing around. That Be More Kind album, I just love that album.”


The Lasso trailer uses a single lyric from the song, the line about believing in the power of the sound of rock and roll to “raise the temple and tear it down.” Very Strummer.  No surprise here, on the wall at the Arcadia brew pub is a Joe Strummer mosaic with the message “the future is unwritten,” his reminder that institutions are composed of people and relationships, even though they may appear to be big, solid, substantial, eternal, unchanging, reified things. And while music can’t really do much to concrete and stone and plaster and brick, it can do its work on human beings made of less substantial things inside. 

Hear ye, hear ye, Frank Turner is back in Edmonton for a show in April.


3.  Bike 

In the times I didn’t have a good handle on who I was or what it was all about, it was my bike that helped with some balance. It’s a remarkable thing, and still is. It’s a machine, it has components, its pieces have to be artfully put together, and then artfully put in motion. It’s a craft that takes craft. At three touchpoints, the handlebars, the saddle and the pedals, it is a splicing together of flesh and bone and muscle with rubber, leather and metal. It’s a grand alloy of human and the human-made that threatens to come apart at every pedal stroke. Despite this, or, more likely, because of this, it’s a reliable deliverer of a precious freedom, all the more curious for needing so much matter to make it real. Not as much matter as a ‘69 Chevy with a 396, but I do believe a frame of freedom just the same.

Thanks for being out there, friends!



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