How Charlie Salmon Changed The World

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How Charlie Salmon Changed The World

Postby Marsbar » Mon Nov 25, 2013 3:05 am

Dave Bidini has given me permission to post this excellent article. It was in The National Post. Read and enjoy.

Dave Bidini: How Charlie Salmon changed the world as something more than an underground guitarist

Fame means little to most who have it, and everything to most who don’t. Fame is not wealth is not success. Fame is an enormously bright and gaudy light that shines across a room of shadows. Fame is Rob Ford, twerking and Osama bin Laden, but fame isn’t necessarily bad or corrupt or evil. Fame is also afforded to those who do great things to better the world. At least sometimes.

Fame is something you learn from television — or, OK, the Internet — when you’re a child, and fame is that which allows some to earn money and sustain status and influence well beyond their contributing years. Fame is the gold target at the heart of the archer’s board, something that we all aim for at some point in the nascent pulp of our emerging lives.

Fame was likely on our minds in the early days of creating music. It wasn’t until later that we realized how great the distance was between there and here, and later still, whether the pursuit of fame was even worth the scars. Besides, as musical kids lost in the relative hinterland of new experience — this would be 1982/83/84; Toronto; the city — there were enough exotic and unknown creatures at hand to make getting from day to day, gig to gig, interesting: Lifers and rookies and day trippers and hard-boiled street types who knew their way up and down the back alleys and behind dumpsters and on stairways behind nasty clubs and bars with their awful carpets and damp walls and prison bathrooms; also, pool tables, because there were almost no dedicated music clubs, just places whose owners thought they could steal some suburban kids’ parents’ money by booking some ostensibly cool band in a stageless corner of their fire hazard of a room.

None of the kids fit in in any of the places they came from — Georgetown, Barrie, West Hill and Etobicoke — and that’s why the city seemed right: a jagged broken puzzle piece with more edges and corners than curves or straight lines; slopes and tilts and inclines filled with the wonderfully unfamous. Freaks and loners and geniuses — well, it’s what they called themselves — hung there, a bottle of London Triple X passed between them, a joint, maybe something worse or better. Willie P. Bennett roved the streets at 11. Bob Snider knew the names of the bums, then became a bum before becoming a recording artist. Once, my young girlfriend and I were eating at the long-gone Queen City Diner — eggplant lasagna shared between us; an extravagant and urbane purchase for two suburban kids pretending to be cool — when a girl dressed in a withered, fringed winter coat and a boy wearing a jean jacket in the middle of January walked in: singer Holly Cole and her boyfriend drummer Graham Kirkland. One of them carried a bottle, spilling it on the floor as they passed our table. We were terrified by how raw they seemed; how stoned and real. Strange kids. Pop kids.

They were here.

Once we started playing — coming downtown in one of our parents’ sedans with synths and crummy guitars stuffed in the back — we saw the gigs not as the pathway to fame, but as a test of survival: after-hours shows in dank tenements and falling-in warehouses where we were heckled by hard cases, like two guys just out of Millhaven who wanted to cut us open because we were “punk,” which we weren’t, not at all, although running shoes and a blazer and a weird Reagan-with-his-eyes-blotted out pin were, I guess, weird enough to make them want to “stuff us full of pudding,” said one of them, which, to this day, I don’t understand (they were cutting us and stuffing us? Made no sense). Others were rousted by cops for just being young, which is what happened to my friend, Dave, a Jamaican-Canadian who had his face pinned to the sidewalk outside the Horseshoe by a cop named Ogerman, grinding road rash into his beautiful face; or the time another friend, Eddie, was chased by three metal girls waving razors, finally catching him and slicing open his winter coat so that the stuffing poured out like foam guts, which he collected in a bundle in his lap on the subway home.

The city and the scene was dark enough so that anyone and anything could scuttle in. Old men from the Mental Health Centre drinking bitters. Skags eating dog food. Coke pushers. Early defectors from Eastern Europe falling asleep hammered under the tables at the Beverly Tavern. This one with an eye patch; that one with no legs. Pickled eggs, 20 cents; pints, two dollars. On Queen Street near Spadina, Bruce Cockburn — there’s one famous name, I suppose — remembers a butcher shop with a pig’s head hooked in the window, which pretty much told anyone who passed where they were and why.

Through all of this, there were also the beauties and the angels who weren’t famous either, but who balanced the harsh toke of the experience, and who kept us coming back despite the weirdness and relative terror of being young and suburban and not knowing whether we had what it took to fumble through the darkness. One of those angels — soft-spoken, strange-minded, and brilliant — was a fellow named Charlie Salmon, Chas, who was the lead guitarist and principal singer for the Plasterscene Replicas, and who came from the same kind of place we did. Although, to my mind, Charlie always seemed as if he came from elsewhere: left by a blinking spacecraft on a new planet not his own. Charlie was different-seeming, gaze askance, moving about awkwardly as if his bones hadn’t quite snapped together the right way. Even when talking, Charlie never seemed to know what to do with his hands, choosing, instead, to say not much, or, even better, communicate with his music: rock music that wasn’t, pop music that didn’t. He sang in a quavering tenor and picked at his wide-bodied guitar with his fingers plucking outward the way a kid might snap at a branch, appearing to both learn the instrument while playing it masterfully. People today may have called him a savant, but because freaks were still freaks, that’s what Charlie was — what a lot of us were — and that was OK, too. The first time I met him, I felt like I was meeting Bowie or David Byrne. Among all of us, we thought Charlie would be the most famous.

His songs were beyond good: Turtle Song and I’m a Child and Pull Out and, especially, We Can Walk, which, to those who heard it or knew it, can easily be recognized as one of the greatest songs this city has ever produced: careening, melodic and deeply sad, yet joyful in the colour of its words and chords: “I’m a strange pill/You are too/We swallow one another.” Hearing it for the first time was one of those rare instances where I knew I would forever remember the moment while it was happening. As a young songwriter, I thought: “Wow. A musician can do that?”

For a few summers in Toronto — maybe two or three — the songs of Charlie Salmon were songs that we all aspired to create. The Replicas and The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos — maybe it was The Lawn, I can’t remember — is still probably the greatest live double bill I have ever seen, even while under the influence, as I am here, of the lager of nostalgia, the ale of romance. I know that, to many, this sounds like me incanting a verse from a hymn book to a large group of people born late to the religion, but spare me the indulgence because, as we’ve seen, fame missed a few; fame misses many. I owe it to Charlie to say these things; to rant about the nature and character of a person most of you never met, and will never meet again, because, on Wednesday, Charlie Salmon died, and now he is gone, so you have to trust me on this. It might not mean anything to you, but it means a lot to me. Through the darkness of those early times — through the dirty city and the strange things that moved through it — people like Chas shone his light — not the light of fame, but something just as clear — and we followed it like hungry moths. Shine on, my friend.
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