Alberta Review: Rediscovering Youth
Small Town (Alberta) Saturday Night
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There’s a small category of song that makes me text my musically-inclined friend to ask: “They knew in the studio as they wrote how good this was, right?” The most obvious example is Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion. Some pieces of art are so undeniably good that even if it’s not your thing, you can recognize their brilliance. It’s what separates the wheat from the chaff; even someone untrained in the technique of an art form or skill can just tell it is of the superlative variety. It’s why Blink-182 is the best pop-punk band ever. You just don’t understand just how damn good a drummer Travis Barker is, but it elevates the overall quality so much, it speaks for itself.
I thought about this while reading Cameron Crowe’s autobiography, The Uncool. Crowe is most famous (probably) for writing and producing Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Almost Famous. But before that, he was writing cover stories for Rolling Stone in his teens, embedding himself with bands like Led Zeppelin and The Allman Brothers at the absolute height of their powers. The passage that sparked my opening thought was about seeing Bruce Springsteen when he was just getting going. It’s easy to forget that the guy who wrote Born to Run was seen more as a new Bob Dylan, a folk singer who wrote deep, meaningful songs to make social commentary. And, his music has never appealed to me. But you have to respect the magic nonetheless. Springsteen was shy, but there was no denying that he had that something and could inspire:
Suddenly everybody was celebrating this small but seismic moment. Springsteen’s shyness receded…The small alley grew even more celebratory. Springsteen had made a mark in a tough town for newcomers. It’s on a night like this that music might spin your life around, give you new passion, point you in an unexpected direction. It was becoming more than a hobby for me, day by day.
On display throughout The Uncool is a passion for music that knows no bounds, and this passion fuels a prose style that is truthful and driving, keeping the narrative going while forcing you to pause exactly when you need to, to fully consider an emotion.
At the same time, he makes it seem like the biggest of feats—a Rolling Stone cover story on the Allman Brothers at 16 after the band had blackballed the magazine was an accident, just a coincidence, and he happened to be the right person at the right time, and nothing else. The persistence and dedication he had to have had are just words, half a sentence; nothing special happened here. Sure, it was the seventies when credentials didn’t matter. But c’mon, the guy clearly has talent, charisma, and ability.
While billed as a memoir, the book is mostly about Crowe’s youth. Lost youth (to him), although if you’re reading it, you’d say he made the absolute most of his youth. At 15, he became a journalist and partied with rock royalty, but felt he had never experienced what it was like to just be a kid in high school. He wrote Fast Times at Ridgemont High to partially reclaim those experiences. At 20, he was embedding himself as a high school student, reliving a life he had never had.
It’s a great book, and a wonderful story about a unique man in a unique period of our cultural history. Sometimes, you pick a book intentionally to match a moment in your life (Hawaii by James A. Michener when you’re going on a trip to, say, Hawaii). Other times, a book accidentally finds the moment right when you need it.
My wife bought me The Uncool for Christmas, so I started reading it shortly after I’d finished my holiday stack. At the same time, I was just back on the farm visiting my family, and my dad had found my old CDs, including the ones that used to live with me in my truck throughout high school and my early 20s. Driving the last new car to have a CD player, I started reliving that period of my life. Music has a way of putting you squarely in a time and place, and I was being shot back to high school in my mind every time I put in a newly discovered old CD.
I wasn’t the most conventional small town Alberta music aficionado. There’s a lot of punk and emo in there. I listened to older country, was even in a band playing older country at that time, but my emotional connection to music was far more raw, far more emotional, than ‘90s honky tonk. It was Green Day and My Chemical Romance. I’d picked up a guitar not because my dad played for years, but because of the lead break in Whole Lotta Love.
Stereotypes exist for a reason. Small town Alberta has many, especially when we’re talking high school kids. Bush/field parties, chopping laps, bonfires. I don’t think much has changed on that front. But thinking back, music was likely the most diverse element. Kids I partied with listened to Eminem, Tool, Metallica, and, of course, Nickelback. Not a lot of country, to be honest, despite the lifted trucks and cowboy boots.
That, I think, was a product of its time, though, just like Crowe’s ability to do what he did was doable only in a particular time and a particular place. In the late aughts, the monoculture was just starting to break down, and microculture dominance hadn’t taken hold. In politics and culture, the urban/rural divide has clearly increased. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same happened to music.
I hope I’m wrong, though. There’s a lot of discussion about Alberta being a distinct place within confederation. And it’s unquestionably different. But within that Alberta stereotype, there’s a lot of diversity. Urban/rural, blue collar/white collar, north/south. Within each of these, too, there are big discrepancies; some will have more in common with their Ontario counterparts than their peers in Edmonton. It’s important to remember that, at the end of the day, behind every stereotype and perception that “they’re all the same,” there’s a farm kid listening to thrash.
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