Nice Day For A Picnic | The That’s Edmonton for You! team joins Trevor Anderson in Louise McKinney Park. Clockwise from left to right: Doug Organ, DJ Cameron Sound, Alison Turner, Trevor Anderson, Paul Arnusch, Nik Kozub, Lyle Bell, Roland Pemberton, Ted Wright, Colleen Brown, Scott Davidchuk.
DETAILS
THAT’S EDMONTON FOR YOU!
Created and performed by Trevor Anderson, Paul Arnusch, Lyle Bell, Colleen Brown, Scott Davidchuk, Gravy, Nik Kozub, Doug Organ, Roland Pemberton, Amy van Keeken, Ted Wright. With Andrea House and Yes Nice. Louise McKinney Park (below the Shaw Conference Centre). Sun, June 14 (noon to 3pm). Tickets: free! Album available (now! for free!) here.
I’m supposed to meet musician and filmmaker Trevor Anderson downtown at the Axis Café to chat about That’s Edmonton for You! — a free outdoor concert, packaged with a corresponding album, commissioned by the City of Edmonton and orchestrated by 12 of the most talented young musicians currently prowling Edmonton’s underground scene. It’s kinda like our very own Broken Social Scene, only with a government mandate.
I get there early, grab a latté, and find a seat just in time to see Anderson glide past the floor-to-ceiling windows that front the café. He doesn’t look up, only forward, striding along the sidewalk of the city he’s chosen to call home, seemingly with another destination in mind.
I wonder if I’m in the right café. I wonder if I truly did spot Anderson’s glossy black jacket and sleek auburn hair. I wonder if I should run after him, brandishing my tape recorder, but before I can decide if I’m above chasing someone down Jasper Avenue for a story, Anderson reappears, apologizes and explains he was daydreaming.
Once I have him sitting down next to me, released from his reverie, he’s engaged, energetic, and quick to keep me on point. “To me That’s Edmonton for You! is an unprecedented collaboration among a really large number of indie rock musicians in town,” he begins. “So the more the focus [of the story] can be on community and collaboration, the more comfortable I’d be.”
And I’m happy to oblige, but if we’re going to talk about this particular community and the collaborative effort that is That’s Edmonton for You!, we have to talk about Trevor Anderson.
“He’s the man,” assures Amy van Keeken, guitarist with The Secretaries and one of said indie rockers Anderson tapped to contribute to That’s Edmonton. “Trevor is the man who makes it happen. He knows how to get other people to make what he wants to have happen, happen.”
The Arts Council of Edmonton must have felt the same way, because when they were charged with the task of commissioning a piece of public art on behalf of the City of Edmonton, Anderson is the man whose phone number they looked up. The project is a promotion for the ICLEI World Congress, an international conference designed to encourage sustainable development. That’s Edmonton is meant to spread word of the conference to Edmontonians, because this year we’re hosting it.
“I got this very strange phone call out of the blue: ‘Will you make an hour of new music on the theme of sustainability?’” Anderson explains back at the café. “I said, ‘You know I’m not a composer, right?’ And they said ‘Yeah, but you can get this done, right?’” So Anderson picked up his phone.
He compares rounding up his gang of rockers to assembling a “crack team” from a heist movie. “I would just call up the musicians and, God love them, each one of them said yes before they had any idea that I was going to be able to pay them,” he says. “I mean, of course — that’s what it’s like here. So then to be able to go, ‘And there’s money!’ was a really rewarding feeling for me.”
Lyle Bell, Anderson’s bandmate in the local dance-rock outfit The Wet Secrets and member of the electric Shout Out Out Out Out, was on the other end of one of those phone calls. “He didn’t put it in those terms — it might have been an easier sell,” laughs Bell. “I happened to be on the road when he called me and I was just a bundle of stress, with no cash. One of the things was, he waved a tiny amount of money, which because I was so poor, I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll do it! Blood test? What do you need me to do? Oh, recording project? Sounds good!’”
Along with Bell and van Keeken, the final list of participants includes Cadence Weapon, Nik Kozub and Gravy from Shout Out Out Out Out, Colleen Brown from The Secretaries, Paul Arnusch of Faunts, Doug Organ of Red Ram, Scott Davidchuk and Ted Wright of The Get Down, and a string quartet led by Moni Mathew. Anderson also brought in DJ Cameron Sound to mix in a vocal track from van Keeken’s tune into a break in Cadence Weapon’s song. So really, that raises the total number of musical contributors from the advertised 12 to a nearly orchestral 16 members — they could start a soccer team! (I can hear the cheer now ... “3, 2, 1, rock!”)
It’s not completely extracurricular to note that most of the above musicians play in more than one band (and you might recognize them from a different act). Community and collaboration is not a trend but a reality for Edmonton’s artists.
The idea of a community of artists working together to produce a sum greater than its parts grates at the myth of the solitary creative genius. Don’t we need a Neil Young or a Lou Reed or a Kurt Cobain to come along for Edmonton to be truly great?
“I think [that’s] a great big fallacy,” answers Anderson without hesitation. “I think ideas themselves are social creations. Often the best ideas come up in dialogue with other people or if you’re sitting alone and thinking, you’re having a dialogue with the various voices inside your head.... I’m going to sound so crazy in the paper.
“But it’s true!” he continues with a chuckle. “They’re not, of course, actual voices but when you’re sitting and thinking there’s a dialogue going on in your head with usually a multiplicity of voices and you only have those voices in your head from the experience of talking to other people. So the more you can work with and talk with, and think with and joke with smart, creative people, the more ideas you’ll generate together and also the more you’ll be generating ideas when you’re alone, because that’s how you practice that form of dialogue. And listen, occasionally. Listen more than you talk.”
Anderson epitomizes this ethos of teamwork — of coalescing with and relying on as many people who will help. And that’s true of a lot more than That’s Edmonton for You! Besides being one member of the five-piece firestorm of pounding sound and dirty lyrics known as The Wet Secrets, he’s also an independent filmmaker. While he applies his formal education in theatre to the direction of his movies, he has no formal technical training, meaning he knows how to depend on good people who do.
It’s worked out pretty well so far since Anderson’s short films have garnered praise at film festivals from Berlin to Toronto, where his short Rock Pockets received the inaugural Lindalee Tracey Award, a prize presented to “an emerging Canadian filmmaker working with passion, humour, a strong sense of social justice, and a personal point of view,” or so the blurb goes. “A lot of the fact that we succeeded in that attempt was thanks to director of photography Steven Hope, who shot it,” Anderson says.
It was a sneaky shoot too. Filmed at Klondike Days (or Capital Ex, for you SEE readers younger than five), Rock Pockets starts out as a social experiment, answering the question, “What would happen if two guys walked around with their hands in each other’s back pockets?” Rock pockets, as Anderson calls the practice.
“That’s a completely illegal film,” he admits. “We put [Hope] in a wheelchair with the camera on his lap, which is a cheap way to get a moving dolly shot. It’s also a great way to get shots without permission because thanks to our cultural biases we tend to not look directly at people in wheelchairs, so nobody saw the camera.”
What the film becomes at the end of its five-minute running time is a treatise on coalition, since the friend who stepped in to put his butt on the line (and on film) wasn’t gay, as Anderson is, but simply a friend happy to help. A perfect example of how far we’ve come since a 10-year-old Anderson first noticed his first “rock pockets” couple and instinctively understood that two guys would never be able to do the same thing without it being, as he puts it in the film, “a really big deal.” Seeing the two men walk along, hands in pockets, is just gloriously uplifting, in the simplest way.
But we still have far to go, as exemplified in what Anderson sees as Rock Pockets’ companion piece.
“If Rock Pockets is about the politics of coalition, The Island is about the politics of separation,” he says. “The idea that’s brought forth in The Island is that I got this e-mail that said, ‘All you fucking faggots should be put on an island where you can give each other AIDS.’ And so I think, ‘Why not?’ So I have this satirical daydream about gay men separating from all other society. Just retreating from the homophobes and having a party island to ourselves, which is a fun idea for a while but, of course, one of the many problems to my mind about separation politics is that it cuts off any opportunity for coalition and collaboration and that, to me, is a lonely idea.... That there would only be one kind of person in society, that we would be limiting the multiplicity, is a terribly lonely idea.”
I think the idea of community is most deeply felt when one finally leaves it. Travelling makes you acutely aware of where you’re from, whether you’re trying to explain the geographical location of Edmonton (hmm ... it’s “close” to Vancouver?) or the weather conditions. (We do get hot temperatures, really we do!) Even when you’re thousands of miles away, you can’t leave your hometown behind.
“I hadn’t thought of this before,” Anderson says, “but when I travel with music people, people more often know where Edmonton is. I wonder if that’s a reflection of our musical exports? I bet it is. It must be.”
We’ve finally gotten around to talking about Anderson’s role as drummer for The Wet Secrets. They hit up SXSW this year and, considering the northern contingent in attendance, they might as well have shifted a chunk of the Canadian Shield into Texas. But The Wet Secrets managed to represent in a special way.
“Our stage outfits are matching band outfits,” he says. “We have two bombshell ladies in the band who wear platform boots and high marching band hats and when those are combined they’re about seven feet tall. They stayed in their outfits and walked up and down the strip all day, each day handing out handbills for our shows and they were mobbed because it was like Mickey and Goofy walking around Disneyland — everyone wanted a picture. They were sort of like the mascots for Canadian music, because their outfits are also red and white, so it has that feeling of national colours. I saw them at one point, they were talking to one of the guys from Priestess, the metal band from Montreal, and some music tourists full arm-shoved Dan out of the way to get a picture with the pretty ladies. They were great ambassadors.”
The irony, of course, is that they’re ambassadors for a city whose citizens may not always know who The Wet Secrets are. And they’re not alone in that role either — Edmonton harbours many a band that’s made noise on the international stage, and whom we celebrate with only a polite amount of mumbling. “A lot of these artists are way more famous outside of Edmonton than they are inside Edmonton,” Anderson says. “You go to a Shout Out Out Out Out concert in New York City and there’s a huge room packed full of people shouting up and down and screaming for these stars, you know?”
Hopefully, we will all get to know our friendly neighbourhood rock stars a little better at That’s Edmonton for You! “I am really excited about the current mentality of the Edmonton Arts Council,” Anderson says about the show’s co-presenter. “I think they are doing a great job of recognizing the art that’s actually happening in the city. Instead of an out-of-touch state of affairs, where the official art would be really separate from the exciting street-level art, here’s an example of the city of Edmonton knowing these artists are alive!”
“He is a person who lives life to its fullest and lives up to his potential,” gushes van Keeken over the phone, as a final explanation of the man, desperate to make me understand his overwhelming awesomeness. “He knows how to live his life and he knows how to pursue his art and make things happen. He’s a man of ideas. He has vision and drive. I’ll be out with him and all of the sudden, he’ll be like, ‘Wait a second, let’s do this... We’re putting on a show! We’re going to rent this and we’re doing this and this is how we’re going to do it,’ and it will be done. And we’ll just be, like, standing outside having a smoke and he’ll arrange everything in his mind and you know in you’re heart that it’s going to happen.”
Which makes me wonder what plan, what pursuit, what possibility I put on hold when I woke him from his daydream this morning. Chances are, it was something wonderful.
Various Artists
That’s Edmonton for You!
(www.thatsedmontonforyou.com)
****1/2
It’s hard to listen to Amy van Keeken’s “Northern City,” the leadoff track to this all-star seven-track suite of songs about Edmonton, and not think that Dirt City has found an unofficial new civic anthem. The lyrics are short and sweet, but they manage to incorporate references to rock ’n’ roll, cold northern winds, and hockey — plus, there’s the killer couplet where van Keeken joyfully sings, “When I see the puck go in the net / It makes me happy, it makes me wet.” Add in the rousing chorus of “I live in a northern town!” and you’ve got an instant classic.
But what’s exciting about That’s Edmonton for You! is that it’s not all fist-pumping expressions of civic pride. I’m not sure if producer Trevor Anderson encouraged his contributors to head in this direction, or if the artists just naturally headed there on their own, but again and again, you hear the same themes coming through in the lyrics: resentment of the oil industry, despair at Edmontonians’ inborn tendency towards apathy, the nagging feeling that maybe we should do what so many others have done and move somewhere else: “The mentality that contributes to the cold,” as Nik Kozub puts it on the excellent closing track, “and weighs down everyone I know.”
At the same time, the musicians’ love for this city is never in doubt — if they criticize some of Edmonton’s more frustrating tendencies, it’s only because they take enough pride in living here to care about making it better. And besides, the very fact that an album as terrific as this one even exists is reason enough to be happy to proclaim Edmonton as your hometown. Highlights include Colleen Brown’s “Workin’ Hard for Easy,” a Heart-style rocker about Big Oil and the average Joe; “Lazy for Everything,” on which Cadence Weapon trades in his usual quick-tongued rapping style for a laconic vocal that recalls vintage Beck; and Lyle Bell’s epic-length “A Devil in the Woodpile,” with its memorable image of Edmonton’s dark and cold getting inside your bones and “burrowing like a devil in the woodpile of your soul.”
I can’t wait to hear it live. Download it now and get ready to sing along with me this Sunday afternoon.
-PAUL MATWYCHUK
Post the first comment: (Login or Register)