BOOK: ‘The History of Canadian Rock ‘n’ Roll’ by Bob Mersereau
Bob Mersereau’s in-depth look at the deep roots of Canadian rock music begins in a very Canadian way: a pop quiz. This is exactly how my father — a fiercely proud Canuck and music lover to boot — would begin his frequent sermons on the unsung virtues of Canadian music. “Did you know that so-and-so, who wrote such-and-such, was actually Canadian?” Even the asking of the question is Canadian: polite, unassuming, and only a touch boastful or proud (for we should never be seen as either even when we are). It’s through this lens that The History of Canadian Rock ’n’ Roll weaves its tale.
It’s not an all-encompassing narrative, but Mersereau (a CBC producer) is careful to note that at the outset; chronicling every artist or band or performer would take more paper than Canada has trees to pulp, such is the breadth and depth of Canadian musical achievement. (As he says early on, Canada “[pulls] way above its weight in the music department.”) So you have a decent amount of space set aside for the requisite heavy-hitters — the Leonard Cohens, Joni Mitchells, Paul Ankas, Anne Murrays — the ones you can’t not write about. But their more famous stories are connected by lesser-known branches in the same tree. And it’s in stories of early doo-wop groups like the Four Lads and the Diamonds (whose records supplanted Buddy Holly’s on Canadian music charts for a time) or of the burgeoning, vital rockabilly scene that nurtured the early talents of Conway Twitty (who was directly responsible for bringing Ronnie Hawkins to Canada) that the larger history gets its teeth into you.
Most readers of a book like this will have the cursory understanding of Canadian cultural exports, the big achievers like Celine Dion and Shania Twain, Bieber and Lavigne and Jepsen, Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene, all of whom are given ample room to exist in the later chapters of this book. But the roots of Canadian rock are often glossed over, and unless you lived at the intersection of Bloor and Yonge circa 1960, you wouldn’t know these smaller but still significant details.
Mersereau does an admirable job giving life to this early history by intertwining it with the more well-known cultural touchstones. Toronto’s Yorkville Village folk scene is painted as vividly as any we might have been shown of Greenwich Village, and it’s certainly as important for fostering much of what came in the next two decades of popular Canadian music. There, we had our own beat poets; sitting in smoky Yorkville basement clubs, instead of Kerouac or Ginsberg, you’d get Atwood and Ondaatje. But it stands apart as significant in the peculiarly Canadian development of Ian & Sylvia or Gordon Lightfoot’s sound. That sound, Mersereau explains, comes out of the shared English, French, and aboriginal roots of our folk history, which just wasn’t accessible to the more famous American counterparts. The same can be said for the Yonge Street Strip, filled with enough counter-culture to rival London’s Soho or San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury.
But Toronto isn’t the only city in Canada (though you try telling a Torontonian that…) and Mersereau is careful to explain that the varied regions of Canada produced just as varied talent. Uniquely situated at the heart of the country, the gateway to the prairies to the west and last stopping point before the cultural metropolises to the east, Winnipeg has always been an important city in the Canadian musical narrative. Here, it’s given ample credit as the birthplace of The Guess Who and the adopted hometown of Neil Young, as well as being one of the forerunners in the genre of garage rock. And the spectacular influence of the Quebec chansonniers is chronicled, especially as it relates to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s in Quebecois culture. Franco-Canada had an established music scene long before Anglo-Canada had even learned what music was. This is all explored by Mersereau chronologically alongside the pop-culture timeline of the country.
The “Canadian conundrum” that Mersereau explores reaches an important peak with the establishment of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in response to the Broadcast Act of 1968, which sought to level the playing field for Canadian content creators in response to the flood of cultural products from the United States and elsewhere. This is how we explain the fact that Canadian bands can reach stratospheric levels of stardom at home and are virtually unknown beyond our border (Rush, the Tragically Hip, and the Barenaked Ladies are all still far more popular at home than abroad). But despite this level playing field, the fact that our brightest stars still migrated away from Montreal and Vancouver and Halifax to the recording centers of America is a hard one to accept, and Mersereau doesn’t shy away from this. The history of Canadian rock ‘n’ roll, and our musical heritage in general, is always one of comparison to our southern neighbors. Books like this aim to educate and inspire interest, and as a general overview, from the 1940s through to the present day, The History of Canadian Rock ’n’ Roll is a fine starting point.
(And, just in case this weren’t already a Canadian-enough book, Bob Mersereau helpfully includes a recommended reading and listening list at the end. Oh Canada, indeed!)
To get your copy of The History of Canadian Rock ‘n’ Roll, head over to Hal Leonard’s website!
