Not everyone’s a critic

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can’t drive the car.

— Kenneth Tynan

Earl Fowler

My stint as a rock critic lasted precisely one night in 1977.

I was a tender and callow fellow, a few weeks out of journalism school, when I learned one morning that I was to cover an appearance by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils that night at Saskatoon’s Centennial Auditorium.

I was an old hand at attending concerts and performances at the downtown auditorium. Heck, I’d seen British proto-punkers the Troggs play “Wild Thing” and “Love Is All Around” in their natty, colour-coordinated outfits just eight days after the venue opened in 1968. The band I was in at the time promptly cajoled our parents into buying us similar vests for our exhilarating gigs in various basements.

By the time the Missouri-based Daredevils rolled into the auditorium (today an unrecognizable convention centre called TCU Place), I had seen many terrific shows but passed on Johnny Cash (a mistake), several visits by Anne Murray (I stand by my decision) and uncounted hours of virtuoso whistling by Roger Whittaker, whom my mom adored.

In retrospect, I wish I’d been there the night Marilyn Manson threw up during a performance. I’d kill to have been in the front row the time Irish singer and harpist Mary O’Hara lost her bearings and plummeted from the stage during the first and only song of her set.

My brother was in the audience that night in 1976 when a completely blotto Joe Cocker, after a few false starts, tumbled off his chair altogether and was carried away with a little help from his friends. Up where he belonged.

Now that’s entertainment.

But it’s one thing to go to the occasional show. Quite another to write about one as if you know the first thing about music criticism.

The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, currently forgotten but not gone, had a couple of hit singles in the mid-seventies: “If You Wanna Get to Heaven” and “Jackie Blue.” That was pretty much all I knew about them. Then and now.

My more pressing problem was that I’d already arranged for a rare first date that night with a young woman I’d met about a week before, while interviewing members of an Up with People troupe who were gearing up for their own Saskatoon show.

(I know, I know. Please don’t judge me.)

The American non-profit group is still around. Their song and dance routines were designed to promote such worthy themes as multiculturalism, racial equality and positive thinking. You might remember their theme song:

Up! Up with people! You meet ’em wherever you go, Up! Up with People! They’re the best kind of folks we know.

And like that. Difficult to take issue with their message, but the appeal seemed a bit … 1950s high school musical evangelical flapdoodle to my suave, sophisticated taste. After all, I’d seen Billy Jack.

But there was something about this girl whose name, I swear, I can’t remember. Stared deeply into my eyes. Touched my arm while I was taking notes. Laughed at my banal attempts at humour.

Only one logical conclusion could be drawn. She dug me. That absolutely never happened! Or maybe she was urgently in need of my manly assistance to help her break away from this pernicious cult?

Either way, I was up for the job.

I asked her if she’d like to have dinner with me and she said yes and I was atingle with excitement all week … when suddenly I had to cover a band of hillbillies I’d barely heard of on the very night that Destiny had slated for a glorious assignation. In the words of a late, lamented city editor at the same paper when suitably riled: “Sheep-shittin’ sonofa!”

I was still in a probationary, try-out phase in the job and didn’t feel I could demur. But unexpectedly, entertainment editor Ned Powers — Orville Redenbacher’s brother by another mother — then dropped off two tickets for the assignment in case I wanted to bring a friend. Maybe the Fates were smiling on me after all. Talk about a cheap date.

So I pick her up at her parents’ house in my freshly washed and vacuumed ’72 Datsun death box. Arrive at a low-end steak place (my idea of fine dining). Discover over baked potatoes dripping with sour cream and alleged bacon bits that we have absolutely nothing in common, zero chemistry, zilch to talk about. Up, up with discomfiture. Down, down with at least one too many glasses of pinot noir. Our moment had turned into a nanosecond. Cheque please.

Get to the auditorium and find our seats. Make polite but pointless conversation. On with the show, this is it.

All in all, I thought the band was pretty good. Sort of a poor man’s Doobie Brothers. They’d soon be opening for Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac. But to someone more comfortable with uplifting show tunes and Michael rowing his boat ashore, this was the Devil’s music. No dare about it.

If I had just driven her home, gone to the office and slapped together a boiler plate review as expected, that would have been a forgettable ending to a disappointing evening. I’ve had worse. Nothing to get hung about.

But not being sure of what was expected of a big-city reviewer, and hopeful of salvaging a bit of dignity from the evening by impressing my restive companion with the power of the press, I made a last-minute decision to try to interview the band after the show.

Rather than stopping us, as part of me was secretly hoping after my bold declaration, an affable usher escorted us to a backstage dressing room. Sounded like a party going on inside. I knocked on the door. Nothing. Knocked harder.

Next thing I knew, drummer Larry Lee was explaining to me how the original “Jackie Blue” was about a male drug dealer he had known (back in Springfield, I think) and not the reclusive girl of the finished product, bowdlerized for all the bourgeois “Mr. Joneses.” The room was thick with smoke. The big fat doobie that the band had been sharing was somehow passed to me.

Not wanting to come off as one of those bourgeois Mr. Joneses who walk into the room with their pencils in their hand, see somebody naked and say “who is that man?”, I took a quick glance at the increasingly revolted girl by my side and, so help me God, inhaled. (Bill Clinton would have been cagier. He also would have got the girl.)

What came around, went around. A few times. It soon became apparent that weed from the Ozark Mountains was several orders of magnitude stronger than the seedy straw I’d known in high school. Something was happening here and I knew just what it was.

Oh, they call it that good old mountain dew. And them that refuse it are few …

So now we’re into the purple haze phase. I absentmindedly left behind my notebook with illegible notes, scribbled mostly in the dark, as we left the room. Got lost on the way to my beloved’s house, mixing up Saskatoon’s University and Broadway bridges despite having lived there more than 20 years.

Have a vague memory of someone slamming the Datsun door. Never saw her again. Don’t even remember what she looked like. Except disgusted.

So no goodnight kiss then?

Miraculously crawled my way back to the newspaper office by 11 or so without incident. Wrote my lead. Something about battening down the hatches and hiding the women and children, Festus, because the down-home country rock Ozarks were in town!

I was going for an antic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas sort of vibe. Maybe with a little Lester Bangs commingled with a sprinkling of Greil Marcus and a pinch of Robert Christgau. An evening to dismember.

And then nothing. Not a dicky bird. Not a sausage. Just a bleak, blank void of boundless, immutable nothingness.

Sweet Francis Ann.

I was at my whirring electric typewriter the next morning as surprised copy editors shlepped in, one by one, in the usual fashion array of khaki dockers and button-down plaid shirts. My head was clearing just enough to peck out some perfunctory bunkum from the press kit bumf. No internet or AI in those days to bail out the baked, bombed and buzzed.

Caught a few hours’ sleep and returned for the next day’s shift looking like something the cat drugged. Not in. Just drugged.

Was relieved to see that my devilishly clever intro had been rewritten. Diplomatic colleagues said nothing. The piece would have been better if I had knocked it off in five minutes without ever seeing the band.

Still, it wasn’t a total fiasco. I wasn’t asked to cover that week’s Up with People show. Or any show. Ever again.

If you wanna get to hell, you gotta raze a little heaven.