A musical theme: Toronto 3

I have a few regrets in my life. One is not buying nine doughnuts for a pound in Cleethorpes; another is never buying art by Jay Russell, who incorporated vinyl records into his jazz paintings. And a third regret is that, in all the years I lived in Toronto, I never went to Hugh’s Room. 

Throughout the 2000s this venue has hosted pretty much every legend of folk and acoustic music I could name: Pete Seeger, Maria Muldaur, Janis Ian, Eric Andersen, Ian Tyson, Judy Collins. I didn’t come when Richie Havens, a Woodstock icon, played here the year I moved away; now he’s gone. And I wasn’t there when Odetta played what turned out to be her last concert on earth, in October 2008. (She was supposed to perform at President Obama’s inauguration, but didn’t live to see it.)

We are now living near Roncesvalles Avenue, and I was thrilled to find that Hugh’s Room is still alive, just up the street. Like so many great arts-related spaces, it closed for financial reasons, but unlike many it reopened last year as a non-profit community venue. Hugh’s Room Live was welcoming back Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and I was going to be there.

Elliott, 87, is a last living link to the generation that inspired Bob Dylan, rather than the other way around. He was a friend of Woody Guthrie and brought traditional American songs not only to the mainstream, but to England (Mick Jagger claimed the Rolling Stones were his biggest fans). I got to the bar and thought I’d order a drink before squeezing my way in among the supper tables. While the warmup act started, a white-haired man wearing suspenders came over and stood beside me at the bar. I heard fellow patrons murmuring “Hey, that’s him” before he put on his cowboy hat and made his way to the stage. So yes, I have sat at a bar next to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. 

Odetta once said that her mother gave Elliott his nickname, because of his tendency to ramble on. He certainly lived up to this on the night. He started singing “San Francisco Bay Blues,” forgot the lyrics because someone was taking a picture, recovered, then launched into one shaggy dog story that led into another. Between the songs and the stories he was on stage for about an hour, then drank some whisky, broke into a Scottish accent, and sang some more. I thought making it to 10:00 PM was darn good for an 87-year-old. It was pretty good for me!

In my last post, I omitted the name of Alan, who showed me around the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. Alan Miller is also acknowledged in the book I’m reading now: A Queer Love Story: The Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout, edited by Marilyn R. Schuster. It’s a great plum pudding of a book to dive into in December. Jane, as the letters call her, was one of the first “public lesbians” in North America, writing both fiction and nonfiction that was groundbreaking in its depiction of our lives, most famously Desert of the Heart which was adapted into the film Desert Hearts. Rick was an editor with The Body Politic, a voice of the gay community during the transformative 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Both were “Americans by birth and Canadians by choice,” Jane leaving the U.S. during the McCarthy era and Rick during the Vietnam war. She was older and lived in rural British Columbia; he was younger and lived in the heart of Toronto’s gay ghetto, as it was then. Both were heartfelt practitioners of the art of letter writing, taking the time to sort out their thoughts on pressing issues of the time, and we’re fortunate that two such different people (in many ways) left us such a fascinating correspondence. 

When Jane Rule died in 2007 I was quoted somewhere (as “Canadian poet J. E. Knowles,” love it). My memory of Jane Rule was that she was radical in the 1980s and continued to be radical. In an era when we think we are so fluid and open and yet have such conservative acceptance of institutions like marriage or the military, it is a useful and sometimes uncomfortable challenge to read Jane and Rick’s letters. Jane and another U.S. expatriate, Helen Sonthoff, were lovers for decades yet never advocated either monogamy or state-sanctioned partnership as goals for queer people. Though Helen did say to Jane, rather charmingly I think, about fifteen years into living together that they should stop saying they didn’t believe in longterm relationships, even if they didn’t—it was tactless!

All of which is to say, some good reading time here, and the constant awareness that “the personal is political.” I had an interesting time on U.S. election night watching the returns come in with a bunch of Americans and a surprising number of Canadians, at a bar popular with U of T students. One of the notable results was how many women were elected, though this is not straightforward progress—no one would accuse Tennessee’s first woman senator, elected that day, of being progressive. At least I did not feel, as I did two years ago, as if my skin had been peeled off, too vulnerable even to leave the house. And that was in England.

A very different pub evening was Noir at the Bar, at which I heard a number of writers read, notably Liz Bugg. Liz and I have in common that we each haven’t published a novel in several years, though of course we have been writing. I hadn’t seen her since we both read at Glad Day Bookshop during World Pride.

With novelists Liz Bugg (centre) and Elizabeth Ruth, 2014

November is not winter, but it was already getting cold in Toronto. Fortunately this city is equipped with quite an extensive network of underground paths. You can start walking at the Toronto-Dominion Centre, with design by Mies van der Rohe.

The lobby of one of the towers has a free gallery of Inuit art, which is lovely for visitors who may not make it to Canada’s north. From there, make your way to Nathan Phillips Square, named for Toronto’s first Jewish mayor, and the site of the current City Hall. In winter it's an ice skating rink.

Ducking back into the underground system, I went via the Royal York Hotel to the Hockey Hall of Fame, which had a display of those who were about to be inducted. This year’s include legendary goalie Martin Brodeur, women’s great Jayna Hefford, and Willie O’Ree, the first black player in the National Hockey League.

From Brookfield Place where the Hall of Fame is located,

one can walk to Toronto’s Union Station 

and then take the Skywalk to the Skydome, or Rogers Centre as it’s now called. This is where the Toronto Blue Jays play baseball and the Argonauts Canadian football. Also here is the, for better or worse, defining landmark of the Toronto skyline, the CN Tower. This day its top was completely shrouded in cloud!

As in other Commonwealth countries, the 11th of November is Remembrance Day. Armistice Day, its original name in the U.S., memorializes the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month 100 years ago, the armistice that marked the end of the Great War in Europe. The great slaughter of that war, and the bad peace that followed it, were enough to ensure that a second world war would come, but of course in 1918 people didn’t know that. We remembered their relief, and the great loss of life that war entails, at the Cenotaph ceremony at Old City Hall.

Photos courtesy of T.

I have an earring from the market in Luang Prabang, Laos, that was made from shrapnel found lying around after the Vietnam war. I have also had occasion in Canada to wear the Aran sweater I bought in Connemara, Ireland, and these items from different parts of the world have attracted comments from strangers here, though not as many as my flag backpack! One woman sitting next to me on the streetcar said “I like your bomb earring!” I explained that it was made to look like a bomb, out of an actual bomb, and sold in support of a community in Laos. When she heard the story she liked the earring even better—she called it “anti-bomb.” Seemed appropriate for this poppy-wearing time of year.

T.'s poppy in the snow

The last place I lived in Toronto—the flophouse, as I call it—was near Sherbourne Street, in the St. James Town neighborhood. I wouldn't normally go back there but I had occasion to when Lucinda Williams and her band, Buick 6, were in town performing for the 20th anniversary of a great album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. I couldn't get tickets in advance and wondered if it would even be worth standing with general admission, but I showed up at the Phoenix Concert Theatre anyway. It was remarkable to see how the rather grotty part of town I remembered has been jazzed up. The big apartment buildings are still there, but they have wall art now, and the grungy No Frills supermarket has been replaced by a FreshCo. There’s even a Wine Rack on Sherbourne!

For its part, the Phoenix seemed determined to take everyone back to the 1990s, and not just musically. Everyone, including those with advance tickets, had to stand out in the cold for ages before the doors opened. Then those with tickets on their phones had to wait even longer, because no one could find the technology to scan them! For those of us who didn’t have tickets, it was cash only. Luckily, I pay cash, so in I sailed ahead of the fuming people with virtual tickets. We’d been standing so long that after the show (which was good, by the way) one of the women from the line recognized me by my hat, so we chatted in the subway. Going out at night for live music, talking to women I didn't know—it really did feel like the ’90s to me.

Lucinda Williams & Buick 6

We’ve had repeat dinners with friends too, including Trudy, Maria, and Wayne and Jay. One of the beautiful things about being here for months is that we have time to see people, even host them, and not just cram into a pub once with everyone (not that that wasn’t fun in the past). A close second, for me, has been our neighbourhood, including being a walk away from more than one independent bookstore. Twickenham has never been the same since Langtons Bookshop closed, but where we live now has been more fortunate. In fact, I’ve read several articles recently about how those independent bookshops that remain in North America can thrive, in spite of all that big-box stores and Amazon.com have thrown at them. It’s no wonder. Going into Another Story Book Shop on Roncesvalles and picking up A Queer Love Story or my special order, Lonely Planet’s Central America on a Shoestring, means having a conversation with a bookseller about the book, or our respective travels. You can browse there, and the authors might actually get some money out of you.

Speaking of our neighbourhood, I was back at Hugh’s Room Live late in November.

One of the characteristics of Canadians is to call attention to someone’s Canadianness—to claim that person. Some people are annoyed by this, but there are two good reasons for it. One is that, in the absence of a Canadian claim, the person is invariably assumed to be American. The other reason, at least in the case of songwriters, is that Canada punches above its weight. Many Canadians really are among the greatest, although not everybody likes to listen to Neil Young or, for that matter, Buffy Sainte-Marie. (Buffy has said she knows some people can’t stand the sound of her voice, and she’s O.K. with that. It happens.)

When our friend and neighbor back in England, Janet, drew my attention to the song “Northwest Passage” by Stan Rogers, I didn’t think I’d ever heard of him. Yes, he was from Canada, and probably not famous anywhere else. I was haunted by the song, but it turned out I did know Stan Rogers’s work. For years, when I attended the Church of the Holy Trinity on Easter Sunday, after the service and all the sacred music was over, someone would bang out “The Mary Ellen Carter” on the piano as a kind of secular postlude. We would gather around and sing the chorus: “Rise again!” Thanks to the prompt from Janet (who’s English), I found that this was also the work of Stan Rogers, and wouldn’t you know Hugh’s Room Live was hosting its annual Stan Rogers Tribute.

I have many Canadian musicians on a fantastic collection I listen to, but I don’t seem destined to hear any of them in person. When we were in Winnipeg Big Dave McLean was hosting jam night at the Honky Tonk on Main Street, but we had an early morning flight to Churchill so didn’t go. Then Linda McRae was supposed to sing at the Stan Rogers tribute, but she was sick! Luckily for us Beth Rogers, Stan’s stepdaughter, joined other family members and the songs Linda McRae would have sung were covered.

I haven’t heard all two hundred songs that Stan Rogers wrote or recorded in his thirty-three years on earth. But I can tell you that every one I heard at Hugh’s Room was really good. This, too, is probably a matter of taste. Many people can probably live their whole lives happily without singing along to “The Mary Ellen Carter” or the encore “Northwest Passage” with a roomful of people. For me, it was one of the most moving experiences I've ever had, never mind on these travels.

“No matter what you've lost, be it a home, a love, a friend

Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again!”